Filed: Jul. 07, 2014
Latest Update: Mar. 02, 2020
Summary: summary judgment for appellees. The magistrate judge, on, the parties joint motion, consolidated the cases for purposes of, allowing joint discovery on the issue of defendants policy of, issuing padlocks to inmates at the Maine State Prison.that these assaults caused Lakin and Landry serious harm.
United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 13-2210
DAVID LAKIN,
Plaintiff, Appellant,
v.
PATRICIA BARNHART, in her individual capacity as
Warden of the Maine State Prison & MARTIN MAGNUSSON,
in his individual capacity as Commissioner,
Maine Department of Corrections,
Defendants, Appellees,
JOHN DOE, in his individual capacity as
Unit Manager, Maine State Prison,
Defendant.
No. 13-2211
GERARD LANDRY,
Plaintiff, Appellant,
v.
PATRICIA BARNHART, in her individual capacity as
Warden of the Maine State Prison & JOSEPH PONTE,
in his individual capacity as Commissioner,
Maine Department of Corrections,
Defendants, Appellees,
JOHN DOE, in his individual capacity as
Unit Manager, Maine State Prison,
Defendant.
APPEALS FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MAINE
[Hon. John A. Woodcock, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Thompson, Circuit Judge,
Souter,* Associate Justice,
and Kayatta, Circuit Judge.
Verne Paradie for appellants.
James E. Fortin, Assistant Attorney General, with whom Janet
T. Mills, Maine Attorney General, was on brief, for appellees.
July 7, 2014
*
Hon. David H. Souter, Associate Justice (Ret.) of the
Supreme Court of the United States, sitting by designation.
SOUTER, Associate Justice.
The appellants in these consolidated cases, David Lakin
and Gerard Landry, are inmates in the Maine State Prison. Their
actions charge the appellees, officials in the Maine Department of
Corrections, with deliberate indifference to a substantial risk
that inmates would use padlocks issued to them by the Prison to
assault fellow inmates such as the appellants. See Farmer v.
Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994). We agree with the district court
that Lakin and Landry have failed to raise a triable issue of
substantial risk of assault by padlock and therefore affirm the
summary judgment for appellees.
I.
While inmates at the Maine State Prison, David Lakin and
Gerard Landry each suffered serious injury in assaults by other
inmates using prison-issued padlocks as weapons. In 2010, Lakin
was assaulted by two or possibly three others, at least one of whom
struck Lakin in the head, face and neck with a padlock. Roughly a
year later, Landry was assaulted by another inmate who struck
Landry’s head and torso with a padlock.
From January 2004 through June 2012, there were at least
372 reported inmate-on-inmate assaults at the Prison, in at least
17 of which padlocks were weapons. Beginning in 2007 and extending
through 2012, the total number of all varieties of reported
assaults at the Prison rose significantly from past levels, with at
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least 25 in 2007, 28 in 2008, 50 in 2009, 49 in 2010, 52 in 2011,
and 86 in the first nine months of 2012.1 There were generally no
more than two reported padlock assaults annually during this six-
year time period, with the notable exception of 2010, when six were
reported. See Lakin v. Barnhart, 2013 WL 5407213, at *1 (D. Me.
2013) (noting that there were no reported padlock assaults in 2007,
two in 2008, two in 2009, six in 2010, one in 2011, and one in
2012); Landry v. Barnhart,
2013 WL 5407220, at *1 (D. Me. 2013)
(same). The summary judgment record does not contain any
indication of the level of violence that is customary or generally
to be expected at prisons the size and character of Maine’s.
Nor does the record serve to explain the spike in
violence culminating in the general level for 2012 or the six
padlock assaults in 2010. One can only say that the overall
violence accelerated roughly with the arrival of a new warden,
appellee Patricia Barnhart, whose tenure began in 2009 and
continued through the close of discovery in 2012. Barnhart was a
successor of appellee Martin Magnusson, who served as Commissioner
1
The Maine Department of Corrections maintains a database of
reported inmate-on-inmate violence. The parties agree that the
database does not capture the full spectrum of violence that occurs
in the Prison. The statistics on reported assaults cited here
include the figures from the database, with the assaults on Lakin
and Landry added. See Lakin v. Barnhart, 2013 WL 5407213, at *1
(D. Me. 2013); Landry v. Barnhart,
2013 WL 5407220, at *1 (D. Me.
2013).
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of the Maine Department of Corrections until he retired in 2011 and
was replaced by appellee Joseph Ponte.
The record does disclose, however, why padlocks get into
prisoners’ hands. Maine law requires prison authorities to provide
inmates with reasonable means to secure their belongings safely.
See 34-A M.R.S. §3031(7) (“Any person residing in a correctional or
detention facility has a right to . . . [a] reasonably secure area
for maintenance of permitted personal effects.”). The Prison
accordingly has a longstanding practice2 and informal policy of
issuing footlockers with padlocks to all inmates except those
housed in segregated units.3 See Appendix in No. 13-2211 (“App’x”)
at 18 (quoting the Prison Handbook: “The prisoner is responsible
to secure his personal property in his assigned storage box with
[a] padlock when leaving his cell.”).
Although they knew that inmates sometime used padlocks to
assault other prisoners, Magnusson and Barnhart were both of the
opinion that providing padlocks actually lowers the level of
violence by reducing theft, which often precipitates inmate
2
The record does not contain precise information on when the
practice began. However, it was extant well before Barnhart began
her tenure as Warden. The record indicates that Magnusson was
employed by the Maine Department of Corrections in the early 1970s
and that the practice has been in effect “for as long as [he] can
remember.” App’x 18, 29-30.
3
The policy does not extend to the most dangerous prisoners, who
are housed in segregation, because those inmates are allowed very
few personal possessions and are kept “locked down” most of the
time. App’x 19.
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conflict. The pertinence of this general observation is uncertain,
however, since both Lakin and Landry were housed in the Prison’s
“close custody” unit, where prisoners with “serious” criminal
backgrounds are placed. App’x 102. Inmates in that unit are kept
in individual cells that lock automatically when the doors are
closed. Accordingly, only around half of the inmates in the unit
actually use the padlocks to secure their belongings. In the
experience of Dwight Fowles, the manager of the close custody unit,
theft “happens from time to time” in the unit but is “not a real
regular occurrence.” App’x 111.
The Prison has no practice or policy of taking away a
padlock for any reason, even after the inmate has used it to
assault another prisoner. Barnhart testified that she sees no need
to take away such an inmate’s padlock, because the inmates are “in
a prison where if they want to find a weapon, they will find a
weapon.” App’x 103. Instead, the Prison relies on a number of
policies designed to deter inmate violence, such as specific
housing placements, segregation of particularly dangerous inmates,
and individual management plans.
II.
A.
Lakin and Landry filed complaints in federal district
court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and the Maine Civil Rights Act, 5
M.R.S. § 4682, pleading violations of their Eighth Amendment
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rights.4 The complaints charge that appellees’ failure to take
adequate measures to protect inmates at the Prison from padlock
assaults violated Lakin’s and Landry’s Eighth Amendment right
against subjection to cruel and unusual punishment. Specifically,
Lakin and Landry alleged that defendant “prison officials were
aware of the use of padlocks as weapons in inmate assaults on each
other, but despite that knowledge, continued to allow inmates to
possess such items and continued to disburse such items to inmates
entering prison.” App’x 13.
B.
Following discovery, the magistrate judge recommended
that appellees’ motions for summary judgment be granted. The
magistrate found that “the number of padlock assaults per year has
typically been relatively low,” and concluded that the joint
“summary judgment record does not demonstrate a long-standing
4
Lakin and Landry have at all times been represented by the same
counsel, and their complaints are virtually identical, other than
their different recitations of the facts relating to the assaults
each suffered. Compare Appendix in 13-2211, at 11-15 (Landry
Complaint) with Appendix in 13-2210, at 12-16 (Lakin Complaint).
Lakin’s and Landry’s cases were classified as related, assigned to
the same district court judge and referred to the same magistrate
judge for purposes of managing discovery. The magistrate judge, on
the parties’ joint motion, consolidated the cases for purposes of
allowing joint discovery “on the issue of defendants’ policy of
issuing padlocks to inmates at the Maine State Prison.” Report of
Telephone Conference and Amended Scheduling Order, Dkt No. 27,
Lakin v. Barnhart, 11-cv-00332; Dkt No. 25, Landry v. Barnhart,
12-cv-00016. On appeal, the parties filed separate briefs in the
two cases, but the briefs are, again, virtually identical other
than their recitations of the facts relating to the assaults. We
resolve Lakin’s and Landry’s appeals by joint opinion.
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history of frequent padlock assaults.” Lakin, 2013 WL 5407213, at
*14-15; Landry,
2013 WL 5407220, at *14-15. The magistrate
therefore recommended dismissal of the claims because there were no
issues of fact with the potential to meet a plaintiff’s burden of
demonstrating that the Prison’s policies and practices created a
“substantial risk” that they would be assaulted with a padlock. At
the same time, the magistrate cautioned that her conclusion was
merely “a reflection upon the snapshot presented by the summary
judgment record” and was not to be construed “as foreclosing any
future challenge to the padlock policy” supported by an adequate
record. Lakin,
2013 WL 5407213, at *15; Landry,
2013 WL 5407220,
at *15.
The district court, again in separate but materially
identical opinions, adopted the magistrate’s recommendations and
granted appellees’ motions for summary judgment dismissing the
complaints. The district court “agree[d] with the Magistrate
Judge” that the summary judgment record was insufficient to
“generate[] a genuine dispute of material fact” as to whether
“providing inmates with padlocks subjected [Landry and Lakin] to
conditions posing a substantial risk of serious harm” in violation
of the Eighth Amendment. Lakin, 2013 WL 5407213, at *7; Landry,
2013 WL 5407220, at *7. We review the district court’s judgment de
novo, under the rule that summary judgment is called for when
“there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant
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is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” Fed. R. Civ. P.
56(a).
III.
A.
Under the Eighth Amendment, “prison officials have a duty
to protect prisoners from violence at the hands of other
prisoners.” Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 833 (1994) (quoting
Cortes-Quinones v. Jimenez-Nettleship,
842 F.2d 556, 558 (1st Cir.
1988) (ellipsis omitted)); see also
ibid. (“Having incarcerated
persons with demonstrated proclivities for antisocial criminal, and
often violent, conduct, having stripped them of virtually every
means of self-protection and foreclosed their access to outside
aid, the government and its officials are not free to let the state
of nature take its course.” (internal citation, quotation marks,
and brackets omitted)). Not “every injury suffered by one prisoner
at the hands of another,” however, “translates into constitutional
liability.”
Id. at 834. Instead, a prison official violates an
inmate’s Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual
punishment “based on a failure to prevent harm” to the inmate only
under two circumstances: “the inmate must show that he is
incarcerated under conditions posing a substantial risk of serious
harm,” and the prison official must have acted, or failed to act,
with “deliberate indifference to inmate health or safety.”
Ibid.
(internal quotation marks omitted).
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B.
The complaints make clear that the only source of
substantial risk alleged and at issue here is the Prison’s policy
and practice of issuing padlocks to inmates, despite appellees’
knowledge that “several inmates at the . . . Prison have been
assaulted by other inmates using padlocks as weapons.” App’x 13.
But the complaints do not allege, nor do Lakin and Landry assert on
appeal, any practice or policy on the part of the Prison that might
account for the rise in padlock assaults in 2010, and the pleadings
and briefs do not attempt to connect the overall increase in
violence at the Prison from 2007 to 2012 as an explanatory context
to the claims that are pleaded in the complaints. For that matter,
the complaints do not mention the overall spike in violence that
occurred in the Prison from 2007 to 2012, and neither Lakin nor
Landry has ever proffered any explanation for the dramatic upswing;
they do not allege that the arrival of appellee Barnhart as the
Prison’s new warden is pertinent to the sequence of violence over
that period, nor is there any indication in the summary judgment
record of an arguably relevant change in Prison practice or policy
following the arrival of the new Prison administration. Thus, what
is at stake in this appeal is the constitutionality of the Prison’s
padlock policy and practice, as viewed in a spare record, nothing
more.
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C.
The district court granted summary judgment for appellees
based on its determination that the summary judgment record
described no ground on which a reasonable jury could conclude that
inmates at the Prison faced a substantial risk of being assaulted
with a padlock by their fellow inmates. That determination was
sound.
The Supreme Court has characterized a “substantial” risk
as one that is “objectively intolerable,” Farmer, 511 U.S. at 846,
and in a case much like this at least one of our sister Circuits
has equated a “substantial” risk with one that is “pervasive,” see
Beaton v. Tennis, 460 F. App’x 111, 114-15 (3rd Cir. 2012)
(affirming grant of summary judgment dismissing Eighth Amendment
claim concerning the danger of padlocks in prison, where assaults
involving a padlock “typically occur[red] at a rate of 1 or 2 per
year”).
This Circuit has not yet had occasion to attempt
precision in explaining when the risk of violence among inmates is
sufficiently “substantial” to satisfy the first prong of Farmer,
and we need not close in on it now. It suffices, rather, to say
that, wherever the line between substantial and insubstantial risks
may lie, the risk as described here falls well within the zone of
those too insubstantial for an Eighth Amendment claim. As already
recounted, the annual occurrences of padlock assaults at the Prison
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have generally been few, both in absolute number and as a
percentage of the total inmate violence. There were only six such
assaults even at the height of disorder, in 2010, and the numbers
quickly receded to their norm of one or two annually. To be sure,
one assault, of any sort, is unacceptable, and there is no dispute
that these assaults caused Lakin and Landry serious harm. But we
cannot say that a small number of assaults involving the use of a
particular prison-issued item, without more, is sufficient to
sustain the conclusion that providing the item without restriction
created “conditions posing a substantial risk of serious harm”
rising to the level of constitutional violation. Farmer, 511 U.S.
at 834.
Whether “more” evidence in appellants’ favor might have
been presented, we simply do not know. Given the low numbers
involved, it seems unlikely that a stronger case for substantiality
could have been made out, but in any event no such information was
presented. The record, for example, is bare on (i) the population
of inmates over time, whether fluctuating or steady; (ii) the level
of violence that might be expected at an institution the size and
character of the Prison; (iii) any change in the violent potential
of inmates housed in the Prison; (iv) any relevant changes in the
Prison’s practices or policies that might account for the increase
in overall inmate violence, the rise in padlock assaults in 2010,
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or their drop thereafter; and (v) any explanation for the sequence
of developments correlated with Barnhart’s arrival as warden.
To be clear, we do not suggest that there is some
freestanding, numerical threshold (ex ante or ex post) for the
level of violence among inmates that is necessary for its risk to
be considered “substantial” under Farmer. After all, Farmer itself
involved a sui generis danger that apparently had never before
materialized at the institution involved. See id. at 829-30, 848
(a biological male transsexual who “project[ed] feminine
characteristics,” had been beaten and raped after being placed in
the general male prison population at a high security prison). But
not every risk carries an inherent threat at a substantial level,
or of severity beyond the norms, and here the only record evidence
Lakin and Landry offer to suggest that the risk of padlock assaults
was “substantial” is the relatively low frequency with which they
occurred at the Prison during the period leading up to the assaults
they suffered. This, standing alone, does not create a genuine
issue of material fact as to whether the risk was sufficiently
substantial to support an Eighth Amendment claim under Farmer.5
5
Given our holding that Lakin and Landry did not make the showing
sufficient to entitle them to a trial on the first condition
necessary for liability under Farmer, we do not reach the separate
question whether the appellee prison officials demonstrated
“deliberate indifference” to the risk of inter-inmate padlock
assaults.
Farmer, 511 U.S. at 828. On appeal, Lakin and Landry
focus almost exclusively on this second Farmer prong. It is enough
to say that evidence and arguments exists on each side of this
issue.
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Finally, because the district court was on firm ground in
finding no potential for a reasonable jury to determine that
defendants violated Landry and Lakin’s Eighth Amendment rights, we
conclude that the trial court likewise correctly held that
appellees were entitled to qualified immunity.
IV.
The judgment of the district court is affirmed.
It is so ordered.
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