W. EUGENE DAVIS, Circuit Judge:
Plaintiff-Appellant, the widow of Gregory Maurice Kitchen ("the deceased"), brings several constitutional claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against Defendants-Appellees. First, Plaintiff-Appellant claims that individual Defendants-Appellees used excessive force against the deceased to extract him from his jail cell while in pretrial detention at Dallas County Jail, which resulted in the deceased's asphyxiation and death. Second, Plaintiff-Appellant claims that Defendants-Appellees acted with deliberate indifference to the deceased's medical needs by failing to contact Dallas County Jail's medical personnel prior to extracting the deceased from his jail cell. As to both of these claims, Plaintiff-Appellant argues that the nine detention officers
In the present appeal, Plaintiff-Appellant challenges the district court's order of April 24, 2013, which granted Defendants-Appellees' motion for summary judgment as to all of Plaintiff-Appellant's claims. In that order, the district court concluded that the record contained insufficient evidence to create a genuine issue of material fact relating to Plaintiff-Appellant's claims for either excessive force or deliberate indifference to the deceased's medical needs. The district court therefore had no reason to address Plaintiff-Appellant's arguments regarding the individual detention officers' bystander liability under Hale, 45 F.3d at 919. The district
We now reverse and remand in part, and affirm in part. For the reasons set forth below, the record does indeed present genuine issues of material fact from which a jury could conclude that excessive force was used against the deceased. On remand, therefore, the district court must consider in the first instance whether any or all of the individual Defendants-Appellees may proceed to trial on a theory of direct liability for use of force or, in the alternative, on a theory of bystander liability. The district court should also consider in the first instance whether the individual Defendants-Appellees are entitled to qualified immunity.
As to Plaintiff-Appellant's claim against the individual Defendants-Appellees for deliberate indifference to the deceased's medical needs, however, we conclude that the district court's analysis was correct. As explained below in greater detail, we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment on this claim.
Finally, we affirm summary judgment as to Defendant-Appellee Dallas County's municipal liability for failing to provide adequate training to the detention officers. Plaintiff-Appellant has neither demonstrated a pattern of constitutional violations similar to those at issue in this case, nor demonstrated that this single incident of injury was highly predictable and patently obvious. Plaintiff-Appellant's arguments as to this claim must therefore be rejected.
All of the events relevant to this case took place in January 2010, while the deceased was in pretrial detention at Dallas County Jail. With a few critical exceptions, most of the facts are not in dispute. Because the deceased had been observed "digging through other detainees' personal property," as well as "mumbling, walking backwards, and avoiding eye contact with others," the deceased was placed in the facility's West Tower for psychiatric evaluation. During interviews with medical staff in the West Tower, the deceased urinated on himself, cried, stated that he could hear his mother's voice, and admitted to having suicidal thoughts.
Just before midnight on January 21, 2010, the deceased was observed pacing around his jail cell and hitting his head on the cell door and walls. A detention officer sent the deceased to a nursing station for evaluation. Shortly after midnight, the deceased "broke free from the guards, started screaming, and grabbed one of the nurses" before two detention officers "subdued [him] ... and placed him in a restraint chair where he remained from 12:25 a.m. until at least 5:15 a.m." Out of concern that "he was going to assault the medical staff," who are based mostly in the West Tower, a supervisor transferred the deceased to the North Tower.
The deceased was placed in a cell in the North Tower near to the cell of an inmate named Etheridge. Both had been designated as suicidal. In the afternoon on January 22, 2010, Etheridge attempted suicide by cutting himself, which brought several of the detention officers on duty into Etheridge's cell in an effort to save Etheridge's life.
While the detention officers were attending to Etheridge, the deceased began to scream obscenities and cry out for his mother. According to the detention officers, the deceased also resumed banging his head against the bars. One of the detention officers, Defendant-Appellee Guzman, left Etheridge's jail cell, told the deceased to stop banging his head, and
At this point, Defendants-Appellees Guzman and Myers attempted to extract the deceased from his cell and return him to a restraint chair. They were assisted by the other individual detention officers named in this lawsuit, all of whom had been present in the North Tower and near the deceased's cell at the time. The detention officers spent "seven to eight minutes" talking to the deceased, during which time the deceased "was not banging his head against anything or otherwise causing harm to himself." No attempt was yet made by the detention officers to summon the medical staff.
Defendant-Appellee Guzman then entered the cell, after which a violent altercation began. As Defendant-Appellee Guzman explained during his deposition, the deceased "turned around abruptly and raised his hands," after which Defendant-Appellee Guzman then performed a "neck controlled take down" on the deceased, which physically brought the deceased down onto the floor. Using pepper spray, the detention officers subdued the deceased and moved him out of the cell onto the floor of the hallway. The deceased was then restrained in cuffs and leg-irons.
The record contains affidavits by four inmates: John Adams, Morris Simons, Joseph Daniels, and Jason Barcellever. According to a fair reading of these four affidavits, the detention officers kicked, choked, and stomped on the deceased even after he had already been restrained. The inmates also assert in their affidavits that the detention officers used pepper spray on the deceased multiple times after he had stopped resisting. While Defendants-Appellees dispute the factual content of the inmates' affidavits, they do not challenge these affidavits' status as competent evidence on summary judgment.
While still lying on the floor shortly after being restrained, the deceased became unresponsive, stopped breathing, and died. According to the autopsy report, the death was a homicide caused by "complications of physical restraint including mechanical asphyxia" due to "neck restraint during struggle" and the fact that "one officer was kneeling on the decedent's back during restraint." Other factors included "physiologic stress," "[m]orbid obesity and cardiomegaly," and exposure to "oleoresin capsicum," which was one of the chemicals in the pepper spray.
Less than nine months later, on September 10, 2010, Plaintiff-Appellant filed her complaint in the district court alleging constitutional violations under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. On December 31, 2012, Defendants-Appellees filed their motion for summary judgment, which the district court granted in its entirety on April 24, 2013. The district court ruled directly on the merits of Plaintiff-Appellant's claims for excessive force and deliberate indifference to the deceased's medical needs, concluding that neither claim could be sustained based on the evidence in the record.
The grant or denial of a motion for summary judgment is reviewed de novo.
In claims brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, "`government officials performing discretionary functions generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.'"
No liability exists under the doctrine of respondeat superior in claims brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
We first consider the district court's treatment of Plaintiff-Appellant's claim against Defendants-Appellees for use of excessive force. As we held in Hare v. City of Corinth, Mississippi, 74 F.3d 633, 639 (5th Cir.1996) (en banc), "[t]he constitutional rights of a pretrial detainee... flow from both the procedural and substantive due process guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment."
As the district court correctly observed, the Supreme Court's decision in Hudson, 503 U.S. at 7, 112 S.Ct. 995, instructs courts to consider a number of factors when evaluating an excessive force claim. These factors include "the extent of injury suffered," "the need for application of force, the relationship between that need and the amount of force used, the threat `reasonably perceived by the responsible officials,' and `any efforts made to temper the severity of a forceful response.'"
Fairly read, the four inmates' affidavits assert that the detention officers kicked, choked, and stomped on the deceased even after he was already restrained, subdued, and no longer a threat. Although the detention officers have denied taking such actions in their deposition testimony, the respective credibility of the inmates and detention officers may not be evaluated on summary judgment.
Accordingly, based on the four inmates' affidavits, genuine disputes remain as to material facts relating to both the timing and the degree of force used. These genuine disputes affect a legal analysis of four of the five factors set forth in Hudson, 503 U.S. at 7, 112 S.Ct. 995. The district court erred, therefore, when it granted the individual Defendants-Appellees' motion for summary judgment in its entirety.
Several matters remain, therefore, for the district court to address on remand. First, because of its erroneous conclusion as to the Defendants-Appellees' conduct as a whole, the district court performed no summary judgment analysis of the Defendants-Appellees' individual conduct to determine which of them could individually be held liable for the use of excessive force. On remand, the district court must perform such analysis. In this context, we note the observation by counsel for Plaintiff-Appellant during oral argument that the deceased's fellow inmates were never deposed due to a limit imposed by the district court on the number of permitted depositions, despite the central importance of the inmates' potential testimony. Additionally, the inmates' affidavits mention only Defendants-Appellees Guzman, Mosley, Myers, Garrett, Haggerty, and "2 Female Officers." Even these officers' actions are described in very general terms, and the remaining detention officers' actions are not described at all in the affidavits. Rules 26 and 30 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure vest the district court with broad discretion to tailor discovery and permit or limit depositions as it chooses.
Second, the district court must also "examine[] the actions of defendants individually in the qualified immunity context" under Meadours v. Ermel, 483 F.3d 417, 421-22 (5th Cir.2007).
Indeed, courts have frequently found constitutional violations in cases where a restrained or subdued person is subjected to the use of force. The Third, Eleventh, and Eighth Circuits have each held that violent acts committed against a restrained inmate may give rise to a constitutional violation specifically under the Hudson analysis.
Accordingly, based on the general framework set forth in Hudson, 503 U.S. at 7, 112 S.Ct. 995, the case law of our sister circuits,
On remand, the district must also consider the question of bystander liability for excessive use of force under Hale, 45 F.3d at 919, in the first instance.
Bystander liability may be established where an officer "(1) knows that a fellow officer is violating an individual's constitutional rights; (2) has a reasonable opportunity to prevent the harm; and (3) chooses not to act."
Indeed, the Seventh Circuit held explicitly in Sanchez v. City of Chicago, 700 F.3d 919, 926 (7th Cir.2012), that "it is possible to hold a named defendant liable for his failure to intervene vis-a-vis the excessive force employed by another officer, even if the plaintiff cannot identify the officer(s) who used excessive force on him." In Gaudreault v. Municipality of Salem, Massachusetts, 923 F.2d 203, 207 & n. 3 (1st Cir.1990), the First Circuit also indicated that bystander liability may attach even where the officer most directly responsible for the violation of constitutional rights is never identified.
In the present case, the district court's opinion contains no summary judgment analysis of the individual Defendants-Appellees' bystander liability. Although Defendants-Appellees do not contest that these detention officers were at least present during the relevant events, such officers may or may not have had "a reasonable opportunity to realize the excessive nature of the force and to intervene to stop it" under Hale, 45 F.3d at 919. The district court is therefore obliged to consider this question on remand, as well as whether any of the individual Defendants-Appellees may invoke qualified immunity as to this claim.
Plaintiff-Appellant also argues that the district court improperly concluded that the record presented no genuine issue of material fact with respect to the detention officers' deliberate indifference to the deceased's medical needs. In Plaintiff-Appellant's view, the detention officers violated the en banc court's holding in Hare, 74 F.3d at 636, 648-49, by failing to contact the medical staff prior to extracting the deceased from his jail cell. This argument must be rejected.
To be actionable, the detention officers' conduct must demonstrate subjective awareness of a substantial risk of serious harm and a failure to take reasonable measures to abate this risk.
Here, Plaintiff-Appellant does not present any significant evidence that the detention officers were deliberately indifferent to a substantial health risk. The need for the participation of specialized staff to perform the extraction of a mentally ill inmate from a jail cell is not "so apparent that even laymen would recognize" this alleged medical need.
In particular, Plaintiff-Appellant cites two pages of Captain Don Rowe's deposition testimony for the proposition that Dallas County Jail had a policy of permitting only specially trained staff to perform the extraction of mentally ill inmates from jail cells. As Plaintiff-Appellant observes, Captain Rowe did indeed state that certain "mental health officers" receive "special training" at Dallas County Jail and "worked hand-in-hand with doctors during the day mainly to move mental health prisoners back and forth." But none of Captain Rowe's statements can be reasonably interpreted to mean that only these "mental health officers" were permitted to extract inmates from jail cells. Indeed, this portion of Captain Rowe's testimony does not even refer to the act of extracting
Accordingly, even if the detention officers did not choose the optimal means of facilitating the deceased's access to medical care, this is insufficient to demonstrate deliberate indifference to the deceased's need for such care.
Finally, we address Plaintiff-Appellant's claim of municipal liability against Defendant-Appellee Dallas County under Monell, 436 U.S. at 694, 98 S.Ct. 2018. As is well established, every Monell claim requires "an underlying constitutional violation."
Plaintiff-Appellant has framed her claim of municipal liability as a challenge to "five actual and/or de facto policies or customs." These five lines of argument, however, are all addressed to a single, central issue. That is, according to Plaintiff-Appellant, the detention officers responsible for the death of the deceased on January 22, 2010, lacked any specialized training relating to the extraction of inmates with mental illness from jail cells. Although the medical personnel at Dallas County Jail had received training that was more generally relevant to inmates' mental health, those personnel were located elsewhere in the facility. And even though the deceased was mentally ill, the deceased was "disciplined" for his attack
As Plaintiff-Appellant correctly argues, it is well established that "a municipality's policy of failure to train" its personnel can give rise to liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
Under the applicable case law, there are two ways in which a plaintiff can establish a municipality's deliberate indifference to the need for proper training. The first and more typical approach, as we explained in Sanders-Burns v. City of Plano, 594 F.3d 366, 381 (5th Cir.2010) (citations and quotation marks omitted), is to demonstrate that a municipality had "[n]otice of a pattern of similar violations," which were "fairly similar to what ultimately transpired" when the plaintiff's own constitutional rights were violated.
As to the first approach, Plaintiff-Appellant has pointed to no pattern of constitutional violations bearing sufficient resemblance to the events surrounding the death of the deceased. Instead, Plaintiff-Appellant has submitted a report produced pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1997b by the Department of Justice addressing conditions at Dallas County Jail in 2006. The cited portions of the report do indeed indicate that, as of that date, the Dallas County Jail did not "appropriately assess and treat inmates with mental illnesses."
The examples listed in the report, however, are all instances in which mentally ill inmates suffered harm due to neglect in the course of medical treatment. According to the report, one inmate went for more than a month without receiving a prescribed reassessment of his suitability for certain psychotropic medications. Another
These instances of neglect reported by the Department of Justice have too little in common with the circumstances of the present case. These instances could not have provided Defendant-Appellee Dallas County with "[n]otice of a pattern of similar violations" that would establish deliberate indifference to the allegedly unconstitutional violence challenged by Plaintiff-Appellant in the present case.
As for the second approach to demonstrating a municipality's deliberate indifference based on the failure to train, Plaintiff-Appellant has not established the applicability of the "limited exception for single-incident liability."
To summarize, Plaintiff-Appellant has failed to identify any pattern of past constitutional violations similar to the events of the present case, and has not demonstrated that the prospect of constitutional violations should have been "highly predictable" or "patently obvious" in the present case.
For these reasons, we conclude that the record presents genuine issues of material fact with respect to Plaintiff-Appellant's claim for excessive force. Therefore, we REVERSE and REMAND in part, so that the district court may consider in the first instance whether any or all of the individual Defendants-Appellees may proceed to trial on a theory of direct liability for use of force or, in the alternative, on a theory of bystander liability. The district court should also consider in the first instance whether any of the Defendants-Appellees are individually entitled to qualified immunity in the present case.
As to Plaintiff-Appellant's claim against the individual Defendants-Appellees for deliberate indifference to the deceased's medical needs, however, we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court. We also AFFIRM summary judgment as to Defendant-Appellee Dallas County's municipal liability.
REVERSED and REMANDED in part, and AFFIRMED in part.