State Department of Public Health v. Superior Court

The Center for Investigative Reporting (the Center) is a news organization investigating mistreatment of mentally ill and developmentally disabled individuals in state-owned long-term health care facilities. It filed a California Public Records Act (Public Records Act; Gov. Code, § 6250 et seq.) request for copies of all the citations issued by the State Department of Public Health (DPH) — the agency charged with investigating, licensing, and disciplining long-term health care facilities — to the facilities the Center was investigating.

The Long-Term Care, Health, Safety, and Security Act of 1973 (the Long-Term Care Act; Health & Saf. Code, § 1417 et seq.) lays out in detail the information that must be included in citations issued by DPH and expressly states that the citations are public records, but that the names of the affected patients or residents must be redacted from the publicly available version of the citation. (See Health & Saf. Code, §§ 1423, 1424, 1429, 1439.) Yet DPH disclosed heavily redacted copies of the citations it had issued to the facilities in question, citing its obligation under another statute not to release confidential information obtained “in…