Judge: Joseph Lipner, Case: 20STCV18935, Date: 2023-08-24 Tentative Ruling
Case Number: 20STCV18935 Hearing Date: January 12, 2024 Dept: 72
Peniche
v. California Highway Patrol
20STCV18935
Tentative
Rulings: January 12, 2024
1. Defendants’
Motion In Limine No 5:
Granted in part and denied in
part.
Mr. Cippolini shall not be permitted
to testify about whether any of Defendants violated a statute or other legal
obligation. Experts may not offer their
legal conclusions to the jury. (People
v. Spense (2012) 212 Cal.App.4th 478, 507.) Moreover, the Court excludes
such expert testimony under Evidence Code section 352. Having expert testimony on these legal
issues would be more prejudicial than probative, and consume an undue amount of
time, in light of the central issues in this case.
Mr. Cippolini shall be allowed to
testify to (1) the standard of care for the collection, storage, and protection
of electronic date; (2) the actual procedures employed by law enforcement
agencies to adequately abide by their duties in protecting individuals’ private
electronic data; and (3) the technical and training options available to law
enforcement agencies to protect the private electronic data collected from
individuals. These areas appear to be
relevant to Plaintiff’s general negligence claim.
2. Defendants’
Motion in Limine No. 6:
Granted in part and
denied in part.
Plaintiff shall not be permitted to
present evidence as to past economic harm.
It appears that in the roughly three-and-a-half years the case has been
pending, Plaintiff did not identify any past economic damage claim. It was only in discovery responses served
approximately on August 2, 2023 that Plaintiff identified a theory of past economic
damages.
The only past economic
damage identified by Plaintiff in her discovery response is her failure to
obtain other employment because she filed the current lawsuit. By contrast, she does not contend that the
alleged wrongful conduct of Defendants caused her any harm. The Court is aware of no legal principle that
would allow Plaintiff to recover damages caused by Plaintiff’s own lawsuit when
the wrongful conduct by Defendants did not itself cause any damages. Plaintiff cites no authority that would
permit recovery of damages on such a basis.
For this reason, the Court grants Motion In Limine No. 6 as to past
economic harm.
Plaintiff shall be
allowed to present evidence, if any, of future economic harm. The discovery by Defendants that is the basis
of this motion only requested information as to past harm, rather than future
damages. Accordingly, the Court sees no
basis to exclude evidence of future damages at this time.
3. Defendant’s
Motion In Limine No. 7:
Granted in part and
denied in part.
The Court denies this
motion to the extent it relates to information sealed by the criminal
team. Plaintiff intends to and shall be
permitted to argue that the alleged provision of the sealed information from
the criminal team to the administrative team was improper under the terms of
the warrant. The warrant required that
information “which is determined not to be evidentiary in nature for the crimes
being investigated be partitioned and sealed.”
Plaintiff argues that providing the sealed information to the
administrative team violates the terms of the warrant.
The Court grants this
motion as to all information not sealed by the criminal team. Plaintiff has provided no basis for the Court
or the jury to conclude that there was anything wrong with the criminal team
providing the administrative team with non-sealed documents or information.
4. Plaintiff
may rely on Civil Code § 1798.24 of the Information Practices Act of 1977 to
support an instruction on negligence per se
The Court identified
Civil Code § 1798.24 as the one statute that withstood scrutiny out of the many
statutes proposed by Plaintiff as a basis for a negligence per se cause of
action. The Court allowed briefing by
Plaintiff about whether the many subdivisions of this statute in some way
nullified its relevance to this case.
Defendants rely solely on
subdivision (d) which provides that there is no liability if the disclosure was
made to “those officers, employees, attorneys, agents, or volunteers of the
agency that have custody of the information if the disclosure is relevant and
necessary in the ordinary course of the performance of their official duties
and is related to the purposes for which the information was acquired.”
This subsection may be a
basis for a defense by Defendants, but it is based on a disputed issue of
fact: whether the disclosure was
“relevant and necessary” here. In this
regard, Lachtman v. Regents of Univ. of California (2007) 158 Cal.App.4th
187 does not help Defendants. Lachtman
was decided at the summary judgment stage and was based on the facts of the
case before it. It does not provide a
basis for stating that section 1798.24 is inapplicable to the facts of the
current case as a matter of law.
Thus, section 1798.24 may
be a basis to support an instruction on negligence per se. The parties shall insure that the jury
instruction also includes subdivision (d) to allow Defendants to make their argument
that the statute was not violated.
5. The
parties should be prepared to argue the applicability of Civil Code section
1798.29 to this case
The Court identified this
issue previously. The Court has not yet
reached a determination about whether this statute, too, may support an
instruction of negligence per se.
6. Additional
issues for the Final Status Conference:
· The
parties appear to have updated their requested jury instructions and to have
new objections to deposition designations.
If possible, at the Final Status Conference on January 12, 2024,
the parties shall provide a new joint trial binder with the following documents
(i.e., all the current trial documents) under the following lettered tabs: (A) Trial Briefs; (B) Amended Joint Witness
List; (C) Joint Exhibit List; (D) [This can be left blank in light of the
parties’ stipulation to make mini opening statements]; (E) Current Joint List
of Proposed Jury Instructions; (F) Current Joint or Contested Jury
Instructions; (G) Contested Verdict Forms; (H) Current Joint Chart of Page and
Line Designations for Depositions and Former Testimony; and (I) Copies of the
current operative pleadings. If it is
not possible to get this binder created by January 12, 2024, the binder must be
given to the Court no later than the beginning of trial on January 16, 2024.
· The
parties must provide the joint jury instructions in the form of a Word document
to the Court no later than the start of trial on January 16, 2024.
· The
parties and the Court should discuss whether, given the length of the trial,
trial should run from Monday through Thursdays with Friday being dark, or the
ordinary Monday through Friday. In
either scenario, the parties and the Court will need to inform potential jurors
when the trial is likely to end.