AELE Seminars:
Jail and Prisoner Legal Issues
Jan. 14-17, 2019 -
Orleans Hotel, Las Vegas
Investigation, Management, and Use of Lethal and Less Lethal Force
May 6-9, 2019– Orleans Hotel, Las Vegas
Click here for further information about all AELE Seminars.
A civil liability law publication for officers, jails, detention
centers and prisons
ISSN 0739-0998 - Cite this issue as: 2018 JB December
Click here to view information on
the editor of this publication.
Access the multi-year Jail & Prisoner Law Case Digest
Return
to the monthly publications
menu
Report non-working links here
Some links are to PDF files - Adobe Reader™
must be used to view content
Foreign Prisoners and Immigrant Detainees (2 cases)
Medical Care
Prison Litigation Reform Act: Exhaustion of Remedies (2 cases)
Prisoner Death/Injury
Retaliation
Sex Offenders
|
Strip Searches: Prisoners |
AELE Seminars:
Jail and Prisoner Legal Issues
Jan. 14-17, 2019 -
Orleans Hotel, Las Vegas
Investigation, Management, and Use of Lethal and Less Lethal Force
May 6-9, 2019– Orleans Hotel, Las Vegas
Click here for further information about all AELE Seminars.
Some of the case digests do not have a link to the full opinion.
- Most Federal District Court opinions can be accessed via PACER. Registration required. Opinions are usually free; other documents are 10¢ per page.
- Access to cases linked to www.findlaw.com may require registration, which is free.
|
Foreign Prisoners and Immigrant Detainees
A woman claimed that employees of a county jail violated her constitutional rights when she was detained there on suspicion that she was illegally in the U.S. The trial court correctly ruled that the claim was governed by the Fourth Amendment rather than the Fourteenth, so that a lack of probable cause to detain and continue to detain her was required for liability rather than a deliberate indifference to her right to release, but failed to conduct the required individualized analysis of each defendant’s actions and omissions and whether they were causally related to the alleged violation of the plaintiff’s rights. Because of this, a federal appeals court reversed the denial of summary judgment and ordered the trial court to conduct an individualized analysis. Alcocer v. Mills, #17-14804, 2018 U.S. App. Lexis 28435 (11th Cir.).
Foreign minors who entered the country unaccompanied by a parent or guardian were put in the custody of the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) which later released the plaintiff minors to a parent or sponsor after concluding that each minor was not dangerous to himself or the community, and was not a flight risk. Each minor was subsequently rearrested because of alleged gang membership and transferred to secure juvenile detention facilities. A federal appeals court upheld the trial court’s preliminary injunction requiring a prompt hearing before a neutral decision maker at which the minors could contest the basis for their rearrest.
The appeals court ruled that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in concluding that the minors were entitled to some sort of due process hearing and ordering the government to provide members of the minor class with the procedural protections set forth in its order. The injunction was consistent with a federal statute, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, 8 U.S.C. § 1232(c)(2)(A), providing that ORR should place unaccompanied children in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child. Saravia v. Sessions, #18-15114, 2018 U.S. App. Lexis 27779 (9th Cir.).
Medical Care
A pretrial detainee sued a prison doctor and the private company he worked for, asserting both federal Eighth Amendment civil rights claims and state law negligence claims for inadequate medical care in treating her psoriasis, claiming that she did not receive previously prescribed injections that had been effective in treating that condition, but instead another medication that was on the facility’s preapproved formulary of drugs to be administered. Upholding summary judgment for the defendants, a federal appeals court ruled that the trial court did not err in concluding that no reasonable jury could find that the doctor acted with deliberate indifference to the detainee’s serious medical needs. Zingg v. Groblewski, #17-2115, 2018 U.S. App. Lexis 30527 (1st Cir.).
Prison Litigation Reform Act: Exhaustion of Remedies
****Editor's Case Alert****
A Spanish-speaking prisoner sued prison administrators and officers for alleged violations of his constitutional rights. He was accused of failing to have exhausted available administrative remedies before filing suit, as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act. He argued that these remedies were unavailable to him as the grievance procedures were only described to him in English, which the prison knew he did not understand. A federal appeals court agreed. Because no one ever informed him of the grievance process in a way that he might reasonably understand, that process was unavailable to him and he was excused from the exhaustion requirement. Ramirez v. Young, #15-3298, 2018 U.S. App. Lexis 28437 (7th Cir.).
A prisoner sued, claiming that prison guards used excessive force against him and that he received inadequate medical care after they beat him. A federal appeals court overturned the dismissal of his lawsuit for failure to exhaust available administrative remedies. It found that the defendants had waived their procedural objections to a grievance he filed and that he had then pursued that grievance through each administrative level of review and received responses on the merits of his claims at each level, thereby fully exhausting available administrative remedies. Whatley v. Ware SP Warden, #16-16465, 898 F.3d 1072 (11th Cir. 2018).
Prisoner Death/Injury
****Editor's Case Alert****
After a motorist was arrested for DUI, county officers placed him in a cell with bunk beds instead of the padded cell or the “drunk tank,” which did not have bunk beds. Because the other inmate in that cell had recently undergone surgery, he required the bottom bunk. The DUI arrestee stated that he could not get to the upper bunk. An officer claimed that he told him to remove the upper mattress and place it on the floor. Instead, the arrestee climbed up on the upper bunk and later fell while trying to climb down. He hit his head on a table and damaged his spinal cord, which permanently paralyzed him. Months later, he died, and his estate sued two officers. A federal appeals court overturned the denial of qualified immunity to the defendants.
Even drawing all factual inferences in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, the estate failed to show that the officers’ conduct violated clearly established law. The decedent’s decisions to climb into the bunk rather than sitting or sleeping on the floor and to attempt to climb down before he was sufficiently sober, as well as falling and hitting his head were all intervening events. None of these were so obviously foreseeable that the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonable conduct would have given notice that the officers’ actions violated that standard. Lovett v. Herbert, #17-1668, 2018 U.S. App. Lexis 30467 (7th Cir.).
Retaliation
A prisoner claimed that prison officials conspired to violate his First and Eighth Amendment rights by placing him in segregation in retaliation for his grievances and complaints about his conditions of confinement. Rejecting this claim, a federal appeals court found that no reasonable jury could conclude that the plaintiff’s grievances and complaints were a motivating factor in or even entered into the decision to place him in segregation after a specific incident or that the defendants acted with deliberate indifference towards the plaintiff or otherwise disregarded or failed to act on knowledge of a substantial risk to his health and safety. Finally, no evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, was presented of an agreement to deprive him of his constitutional rights. Daugherty v. Harrington, #17-3224, 2018 U.S. App. Lexis 28753 (7th Cir.). |
|
Sex Offenders
Two sex offenders filed a class action civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a class of sex offenders, claiming that a city refused to register them under the Illinois Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA) because they could not produce proof of an address. A federal appeals court commented that if that were true it might have violated the state statute, because the law provided a mechanism for registering the homeless. The plaintiffs, however, sued under 42 U.S.C. 1983, alleging violations of their right to procedural due process because the city used constitutionally inadequate procedures to determine whether they had satisfied SORA’s registration requirements.
Rejecting the claim, the federal appeals court noted that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees due process only when the state deprives someone of life, liberty, or property. The plaintiffs insisted that the city deprived them of liberty based on a right to register under SORA. This was not a constitutionally protected liberty interest, so the plaintiffs had no due process claim. The court stated that the plaintiffs did not complain that the city incarcerated them; nor did they seek to enjoin the city from doing so in the future. The governmental action relevant here, the intake officers’ refusal to register them, did not deprive the plaintiffs of their interest in freedom from bodily restraint. Beley v. City of Chicago, #17-1449, 901 F.3d 823 (7th Cir. 2018).
Strip Searches: Prisoners
A woman who was a former detainee at a city facility claimed that intake procedures there, including strip searches and mandatory delousing, violated the Fourth Amendment. The trial court granted the plaintiff summary judgment in part and permanently enjoined the city from reinstituting its previous delousing method and from conducting group strip searches without installation of privacy partitions to obstruct the view of other inmates. A federal appeals court overturned this ruling, finding that the plaintiff lacked standing to seek declaratory or injunctive relief because she was not in custody when she filed suit and it must be assumed that she will not return to the facility. The fact that she actually returned to the facility three times after filing the complaint did not confer standing because the relevant question was whether she had a live, actionable claim for relief at the time she filed the lawsuit. The city had discontinued its delousing policy by when she returned to the facility. The court ruled that conducting strip searches in groups of two or three during busy periods was reasonably related to the city’s legitimate penological interest of expediting the intake procedure. Delousing detainees with a fine mist was reasonably related to its interest in maintaining the facility’s cleanliness and habitability. The need for delousing, the court found, outweighed the admittedly substantial invasion of personal rights. Williams v. City of Cleveland, #16-4237, 2018 U.S. App. Lexis 31081, 2018 Fed. App. 0245P (6th Cir.).
|
Youthful Prisoners
|
•Return to the Contents
•Report non-working links here
Resources
Website: Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons. Links to 3,066 full text articles, indexed by topic.
Reference:
• Abbreviations of Law Reports, laws and agencies used in our publications.
• AELE's list of recently-noted jail and prisoner law resources.
AELE Seminars
Jail and Prisoner Legal Issues
Jan. 14-17, 2019 -
Orleans Hotel, Las Vegas
Investigation, Management, and Use of Lethal and Less Lethal Force
May 6-9, 2019– Orleans Hotel, Las Vegas
Click here for further information about all AELE Seminars.
|
||||
|
|
||||