Concussion Inc. to Court in Final Brief: The 141-Page Binder of Berkeley Campus Police Reports in the Ted Agu Football Conditioning Death ‘Should Be Turned Over Without Delay’

by Irvin Muchnick

In our last brief filed before the judge decides whether to finalize a tentative ruling that had signaled his inclination to require the University of California to release 141 pages of Berkeley campus police reports in the 2014 football conditioning death of Ted Agu, Concussion Inc.’s attorney Roy S. Gordet today argued that the secret binder of documents “should be turned over without delay.”

UC “cannot show that it is in the public interest to hide these documents,” Gordet wrote, and has failed to meet Judge Jeffrey Brand’s “requested evidence of a criminal investigation or reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.”

In his November 19 tentative ruling, Brand identified “reasonable suspicion of criminal activity” as the standard the university would need to meet in order to justify exempting the 141-page campus police binder under Section 6254(f) of the California Public Records Act (CPRA), which protects certain types of law enforcement records.

Nearly two years after I filed this CPRA lawsuit in 2017, our motion for the 141 pages has emerged as the climactic dispute of the case. The court invited the university to file a supplemental brief to support its claim for the 6254(f) exemption; our brief today is in response to the university’s. UC will have a final reply brief prior to a hearing before Judge Brand scheduled for January 17 at the Hayward Hall of Justice.

In the next post, we will reproduce the full texts of our brief and my declaration in support of it.

A facsimile of today’s brief is viewable at http://muchnick.net/suppresponsebrief141pages.pdf.

A facsimile of my supporting declaration is at http://muchnick.net/muchnicksuppdec141pages.pdf.

UC’s December 7 brief is at http://muchnick.net/ucsuppbrief141pages.pdf.

Tomorrow Concussion Inc. will upload the three exhibits accompanying our brief today. These are:

• the transcript of the deposition, in the Agu family’s wrongful death lawsuit against the university, of the Berkeley campus police officer who first responded to the scene of the death;
• the first university-commissioned review of the football strength and conditioning program, by Dr. Jeffrey Tanji; and
• the table of contents of the second university-commissioned review of the football strength and conditioning program, by Dr. Elizabeth Joy and Wayne Brazil

Complete headline links to our Ted Agu series: https://concussioninc.net/?p=10877