City of LA asks 9th Circuit to remove judge from homeless case

The City of Los Angeles petitioned the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to move U.S. District Judge David O. Carter from post-settlement proceedings over the city's homelessness policies ahead of a contempt hearing he scheduled for Tuesday morning.

The hearing went ahead in Los Angeles, where the city's attorneys further defended the city council's approval of homeless reduction measures behind closed doors without public input in a state court case before Superior Court Judge Curtis A. Kin, who has been considering a claim of violation of California's transparency law, the Brown Act.

After viewing a video that showed the Jan. 31, 2024 city council meeting being taken into closed session, Carter said the footage "speaks for itself" as a violation of the state's Brown Act.

The city's 107-page brief filed on Monday accused Carter of using the bench to intimidate city officials and play the role of policymaker, often going beyond the scope of the case. Previously, the city accused Carter of bias, saying he adopted the wording of the plaintiff in his introductory remarks at the outset of a proceeding.

The city appealed Carter's orders awarding attorney fees to plaintiffs and appointing his preferred monitor to oversee the execution of the settlement agreement.

Carter awarded $1.6 million in attorney fees to plaintiffs for litigating the alleged settlement breaches. Even though plaintiffs dropped their claims as part of the settlement, Carter deemed them the prevailing party, the city says.

The judge said that plaintiffs deserved the payment because they "brought about significant and material benefits to the Los Angeles community," a position the city's attorneys say disregards the circumstances of the case.

"The City does not request reassignment lightly, but reasonable observers (and the City itself) can hardly expect that a district judge who regularly says and does these sorts of things will impartially adjudicate the parties' disputes about the settlement agreement," the brief, filed Monday evening by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Theane D. Evangelis, states. LA Alliance for Human Rights et al v. City of Los Angeles, et al., 25-4623 (9th Cir., filed July 24, 2025).

Carter called Tuesday's hearing to consider the plaintiff's contempt claim over a vote allegedly taken in city council without public notice, which would violate California transparency law the Brown Act; and a claim that the city misrepresented the steps it's taken to reduce its homeless population. The report about the Brown Act allegations appeared in a newspaper and dealt with a separate case in state court.

"This Court is also concerned about the City's representation that the City Council had passed the homeless encampment reduction plan that was a critical and material issue before the Court. The Court has recently become aware of reports published in the mainstream media that suggest the City Council never voted to pass such a resolution," Carter wrote in setting up the hearing.

As part of a 2022 settlement with the LA Alliance for Human Rights, the city agreed to build nearly 13,000 shelter beds and create a plan to remove homeless encampments from sidewalks. After last year's fires, the city invoked a provision in the settlement agreement putting a pause on its obligations in the event of a natural disaster. LA Alliance for Human Rights et al v. City of Los Angeles et al., 2:20-cv-02291 (C.D. Cal., filed March 10, 2020).

Despite the pause, the city says, Carter granted the plaintiffs' motion for the court to strictly enforce the settlement terms.

In his attempts to enforce the agreement, the city says, Carter effectively rewrote it. The judge ruled that each tent or encampment removed could only count toward the city's quota if it could document that it offered the residents a spot in a shelter. Carter also held the city had to meet each milestone in the settlement agreement even though the parties agreed that they'd be loose guidelines, the brief says.

When the city struggled to meet those demands, Carter resorted to threatening its officials, the brief says.

"He has repeatedly attempted to commandeer elected officials to attend hearings and, when they show up, has threatened to be their 'worst nightmare,' to make their 'lives miserable,' and make them 'dead politically' by imposing radical remedies on the City," the brief states.

The city says that Carter brought his personal beliefs about homelessness -- and the city's failure to address it -- into the courtroom. Carter repeatedly mentioned his own experiences walking in skid row during proceedings and at one point suggested the court should hold a hearing "on skid row and have you folks see it," according to the city. Other times, he cited news articles that hadn't been reviewed by the parties or entered into the record, the city says.

The city's lawyers speculate that Carter had more interest in criticizing what he saw as the city's decades-long failure to curb homelessness than in answering the legal questions at hand.

"The judge sees each new dispute through the lens of what he perceives as 'decades' of policy failures to address homelessness," the brief states.

At one hearing, Carter said he hopes to maintain control over the city's approach to homelessness through the 2028 Summer Olympic Games because "I don't trust you as an institution."

The two sides jointly proposed that either former City Controller Ron Galperin or consulting firm McKinsey & Company be appointed monitor. Carter rejected both and instead appointed mediator Daniel B. Garrie.

In Garrie's first status report, he said the city directed him to its outside counsel for information he should have been able to obtain directly from city employees, which led Carter to start the contempt hearings.