The panel agreed with a lower court’s finding that Santa Rita Jail put adequate safeguards in place to prevent kitchen pests from contaminating inmates' food.

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Despite alarming reports of pest invasions and contaminated food, a Ninth Circuit panel on Wednesday refused to impose stricter health and safety requirements at an industrial kitchen in one of the nation’s largest jails.

An attorney for a class 115,000 current and former inmates at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California, sought to overturn a lower court’s March 2021 order denying a request for court-mandated changes to the jail’s food-handling and storage practices.

The jail, built in 2006 and managed by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, houses up to 4,000 inmates and hosts an industrial kitchen that prepares up to 16,000 meals a day for its own facility and nearby detention centers.

Inmates reported finding cockroaches in sandwiches, rat feces on bread and razor shards in oatmeal — all claims disputed by the jail and its private contractor Aramark, who say they investigated the complaints and found them not credible. The jail also cited health inspections that it says it passed with flying colors.

Even with a pest control service at the jail five days per week, civil rights lawyer Yolanda Huang said problems will persist because an open door covered by hanging sheets of plastic allows rats, mice, birds and other pests to freely enter and roam the kitchen. The sheriff’s office says the kitchen door must remain open so robots can pick up and deliver stacks of food trays to different parts of the jail.

Huang said the lack of a solid door violates the state’s health code, but U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, formerly a magistrate judge, rejected Huang’s interpretation of the code. Corley found the code merely requires a facility be built and operated in a way that prevents vermin and insects from entering.

And in a 4-page unpublished opinion Wednesday, the three-judge panel endorsed Judge Corley’s finding that the available evidence failed to show the jail acted with “deliberate indifference” to the health and safety of inmates.

“Plaintiffs did not meet their burden of demonstrating a constitutional violation in light of defendants’ evidence that they have taken ‘reasonable available measures’ to abate the risk of rodents, birds, and vermin in the kitchen,” the panel wrote in its opinion.

The panel also found Judge Corley properly denied a request to make the jail change how it cleans serving dishes, citing conflicting testimony about the sanitation of food trays. Inmates claim meals come to them on filthy trays with old food crusted on top of them. Employees of the jail and its kitchen contractor submitted affidavits stating that the trays are thoroughly washed and sanitized each day.

Huang had asked for an evidentiary hearing to resolve the conflicting testimony, but the Ninth Circuit said she waited too long to request that hearing after oral arguments on the motion for a preliminary injunction took place.

“Given this procedural history, we cannot conclude that the district court abused its discretion by denying plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction without an evidentiary hearing,” the panel wrote.

In a phone interview Wednesday, Huang said she was disappointed with the ruling and felt the Ninth Circuit should have followed a precedent established by the Seventh Circuit in its 2016 opinion Bentz v. Hardy, which found pest control was an inadequate solution for an Illinois state prison where broken windows allowed birds to freely enter the kitchen.

“The question is why is the jail allowed to avoid complying with basic health and safety standards that every commercial kitchen in California is required to comply with,” Huang said.

Lawyers for the sheriff’s office and Aramark told the Ninth Circuit this month that the jail no longer serves meals on reusable food trays and instead uses disposable trays. Huang said the jail stopped using disposable trays after it found out inmates were preserving them as evidence to prove they were not receiving required portions of food.

The jail has received more than 25 inmate complaints about meals missing food portions, such as peanut butter and carrots, which are supposed to come in specific allotments. One inmate lost 70 pounds between January and August in 2020, according to court documents.

“We were able to prove without any dispute that many times — three or four days a week — they get half the servings of fresh vegetables and fruit because that’s what’s expensive,” Huang said. “The jail is causing people to get chronically ill by serving them high-starch, high-sugar unhealthy diets.”

The Ninth Circuit did not address claims that inmates were receiving inadequate portions of food in its opinion Wednesday.

In a phone interview, Sgt. Raymond Kelly of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office insisted that claims of inadequate food and sanitation at the jail are patently untrue.

“You cannot run a very large jail kitchen facility in the state of California without a tremendous amount of oversight, inspections and public health scrutiny,” Kelly said, adding the jail is working to develop a program in which inmates will grow produce that will be served in meals.

“I’m glad the court saw there was no need to put an emergency injunction in place to stop the functioning of our kitchen,” Kelly said.

The case, currently in the discovery phase in which both sides seek evidence from each other, will continue to be litigated in Judge Corley’s court in San Francisco. The next phase will be motions for summary judgment or trial.

The Ninth Circuit panel included U.S. Circuit Judges Morgan Christen, a Barack Obama appointee and Daniel Bress, a Donald Trump appointee, and U.S. District Judge Gary Feinerman, an Obama appointee sitting on by designation from the Northern District of Illinois.

Sign up for the Top 8, a roundup of the day's top stories delivered directly to your inbox Monday through Friday.