Dockery v. Cain ( 2021 )

Case: 20-60086 Document: 00515966547 Page: 1 Date Filed: 08/05/2021
United States Court of Appeals
for the Fifth Circuit
United States Court of Appeals
Fifth Circuit
FILED
August 5, 2021
No. 20-60086 Lyle W. Cayce
Clerk
Jermaine Dockery, Joseph Osborne, John Barrett, on behalf
of themselves and all others similarly situated,
Plaintiffs—Appellants,
Eddie Pugh,
Intervenor Plaintiff—Appellant,
versus
Burl Cain, in his official capacity as Commissioner of the Mississippi
Department of Corrections; Jeworski Mallett, in his official capacity as
Deputy Commissioner for Institutions of the Mississippi Department of
Corrections; Gloria Perry, in her official capacity as Chief Medical Officer
for the Mississippi Department of Corrections; Richard D. McCarty,
Defendants—Appellees.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Southern District of Mississippi
USDC No. 3:13-CV-326
Before Jones, Costa, and Duncan, Circuit Judges.
Stuart Kyle Duncan, Circuit Judge:
Plaintiffs, prisoners at East Mississippi Correctional Facility
(EMCF), challenged their conditions of confinement by filing a class action
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against Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) officials. After six
years of litigation, including a five-week bench trial, the district court
concluded wide-ranging improvements had made EMCF “not the same
[prison] as the one that had existed when this lawsuit was filed.” The court
therefore found no constitutional violations and denied Plaintiffs’ requested
injunction. We affirm.
I.
Plaintiffs filed their class-action complaint in 2013. They sought
declaratory and injunctive relief regarding numerous conditions at EMCF,
which houses inmates with mental illnesses. The challenged conditions fell
into seven categories: mental health care, medical care, solitary confinement,
excessive force, protection from violence, sanitation, and nutrition and food
safety. (Of those, only claims related to medical care, protection from
violence, and solitary confinement are before us on appeal.) The district
court certified a general class of EMCF inmates and three subclasses,
including one for all prisoners in solitary confinement.
After five years of pretrial motions and discovery, the district court
conducted a five-week bench trial in 2018, during which the judge toured
EMCF personally. The court then ordered post-trial discovery and briefing
to assess the current status of the prison. These proceedings generated a
nearly 100,000-page record.
The court subsequently issued a fifty-five-page order finding no
constitutional violations and denying Plaintiffs all relief. In particular, the
court noted that conditions at EMCF had changed dramatically since the
lawsuit’s beginning. While the court did not “speculate” what the outcome
might have been had “the conditions that existed at the prison when the
lawsuit was filed continued to exist at the time of trial or thereafter,” it found
the current conditions constitutional. Notably, the original lead defendant,
2
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MDOC Commissioner Christopher Epps, had since been convicted on
corruption charges and sent to federal prison. Dr. Carl Reddix, EMCF’s
contractor for health services at the time of the complaint, was likewise
convicted of bribery and imprisoned. The court found “the bribery and
kickbacks . . . likely affected the quality of care that was being provided to
prisoners as well as other conditions at that facility.”
The court further noted specific changes made at EMCF during the
litigation. As to medical care, EMCF had rescinded its contract with Dr.
Reddix’s company and partnered with a new provider of medical and mental
health services, created an in-house medical unit to monitor and treat acute
mental health problems, and established an in-house pharmacy to improve
the distribution of medications. As to protection from violence, EMCF had
hired more security staff and created systems for filling mandatory positions
whenever vacancies arose, either with officers on call or officers previously
assigned to nonmandatory posts. 1 These changes helped satisfy the court that
Plaintiffs had not shown any basis for an injunction.
Plaintiffs appealed.
II.
We review the district court’s legal conclusions de novo. Ali v.
Stephens, 822 F.3d 776, 783 (5th Cir. 2016). Ordinarily, we would review the
court’s findings of fact for clear error. Ibid. But Plaintiffs have disclaimed any
argument that the court clearly erred in its fact findings, see O.A. Rec. at 2:25–
35, so we focus on whether the court correctly applied the law.
1
As to solitary confinement conditions, the court focused more on the
constitutionality of the length and conditions of confinement than on recently implemented
changes (other than installation of tamper-resistant light fixtures to address complaints of
non-functioning lights).
3
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III.
Plaintiffs claimed at trial that various conditions at EMCF violate the
Eighth Amendment’s proscription of “cruel and unusual punishments.”
U.S. Const. amend. VIII. “To be tantamount to the infliction of cruel and
unusual punishment, prison conditions must pose ‘an unreasonable risk of
serious damage’ to a prisoner’s health—an objective test—and prison
officials must have acted with deliberate indifference to the risk posed—a
subjective test.” Ball v. LeBlanc, 792 F.3d 584, 592 (5th Cir. 2015) (quoting
Helling v. McKinney, 509 U.S. 25, 33–35 (1993)); see also Farmer v. Brennan,
511 U.S. 825, 837 (1994). Plaintiffs have appealed only as to three of the
conditions they originally challenged: medical care, protection from harm,
and solitary confinement. They raise several arguments for vacating the
district court’s ruling, none of which succeed.
First, Plaintiffs argue the court erred by considering the challenged
conditions in isolation instead of in combination. To the extent they argue
that all conditions at EMCF should have been evaluated together, that
argument is foreclosed by Wilson v. Seiter, 501 U.S. 294 (1991). As that
decision explained, “[n]othing so amorphous as ‘overall conditions’ can rise
to the level of cruel and unusual punishment when no specific deprivation of
a single human need exists.” Id. at 305.
It is true that courts must consider conditions together if “they have
a mutually enforcing effect that produces the deprivation of a single,
identifiable human need such as food, warmth, or exercise.” Id. at 304; see
also Gates v. Cook, 376 F.3d 323, 333 (5th Cir. 2004). 2 But nothing in the
2
A familiar example is low cell temperatures alongside lack of blankets. Wilson, 501
U.S. at 304; see also Sanchez v. Young Cnty., 956 F.3d 785, 796 (5th Cir. 2020) (considering
whether jail’s lack of medical staff, inadequate intake assessment, lack of subsequent
4
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district court’s opinion suggests it failed to do so. To the contrary, the court
grouped Plaintiffs’ allegations into several categories based on different
“identifiable human needs,” such as medical care and protection from
violence, and considered all allegations related to each category in a distinct
section. 3 The court also analyzed together all allegations of the solitary
confinement subclass. The fact that the court organized its discussion of the
wide-ranging allegations in this way—discussing specifics seriatim before
reaching a conclusion about each category—does not show it overlooked the
possibility of mutually enforcing effects.
Plaintiffs next argue that the district court erred by failing to consider
whether past violations were likely to recur, even if it found EMCF complied
with the Eighth Amendment at the time of judgment. In their view, the
district court could not refuse an injunction without determining whether
there were violations when the complaint was filed and whether they were
likely to recur.
This argument is foreclosed by the Supreme Court’s decision in
Farmer v. Brennan. See 511 U.S. 825. Farmer tells courts how to address a
request for an injunction to prevent the continuation or recurrence of
unconstitutional prison conditions:
assessments, and “pervasively inadequate” monitoring combined to deprive detainees of
medical care against lethal drug overdoses).
3
For example, one section addressed both EMCF’s “indirect prisoner
supervision” system, which according to Plaintiffs used too few security officers to protect
inmates, and evidence that even the existing security posts under this system were
chronically undermanned. The court concluded that “[t]he evidence . . . does not show
that Defendants have acted with deliberate indifference to the risk of prisoner-on-prisoner
violence either by utilizing the indirect prisoner supervision system, or by failing to fill
mandatory staffing positions.”
5
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An inmate seeking an injunction on the ground that there is a
contemporary violation of a nature likely to continue, . . . must
come forward with evidence from which it can be inferred that
the defendant-officials were at the time suit was filed, and are
at the time of summary judgment, knowingly and unreasonably
disregarding an objectively intolerable risk of harm, and that
they will continue to do so; and finally . . . must demonstrate the
continuance of that disregard during the remainder of the litigation
and into the future. In so doing, the inmate may rely, in the
district court’s discretion, on developments that postdate the
pleadings and pretrial motions, as the defendants may rely on such
developments to establish that the inmate is not entitled to an
injunction.
511 U.S. at 845–46 (emphases added) (internal quotation marks and citations
omitted). Additionally, the court “should approach issuance of injunctive
orders with the usual caution” and “may . . . exercise its discretion if
appropriate by giving prison officials time to rectify the situation before
issuing an injunction.” Id. at 846–47 (citation omitted). This restrained
approach is necessary, Farmer warned, to prevent federal courts from
“becoming ‘enmeshed in the minutiae of prison operations.’” Id. at 847(quoting Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 562 (1979)). The district court
correctly applied these instructions from Farmer. It exercised its discretion
to “giv[e] prison officials time to rectify” possible violations and then relied
on “developments that postdate[d] the pleadings and pretrial motions” to
find Plaintiffs were “not entitled to an injunction.” Id. at 846, 847.
Plaintiffs argue a footnote in Farmer supports their argument, but they
are mistaken. That footnote, which discusses how post-filing developments
may shed light on officials’ awareness of risk, states the following:
[E]ven prison officials who had a subjectively culpable state of
mind when the lawsuit was filed could prevent issuance of an
injunction by proving, during the litigation, that they were no
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longer unreasonably disregarding an objectively intolerable risk
of harm and that they would not revert to their obduracy upon
cessation of the litigation.
Id. at 846 n.9. Contrary to Plaintiffs’ argument, this language does not impose
on district courts a duty in every case to determine officials’ past mental
states and make a risk-of-recurrence finding. Reading it that way would
swallow the broad discretion given district courts elsewhere in the opinion.
The footnote merely sketches one way to resolve an injunction suit, not the
only way. In this case, the district court found that—even assuming
violations “may have existed” when the lawsuit was filed—the major
changes since instituted at EMCF removed any potential violation, meaning
“the injunctive relief sought by Plaintiffs has not been shown necessary.”
That finding falls within the ample discretion Farmer affords district courts,
without any additional finding that EMCF officials would not revert to the
prior conditions. 4
Finally, Plaintiffs argue the district court wrongly disregarded the
testimony of their expert witnesses—Dr. Marc Stern, Madeleine LaMarre,
and Dr. Terry Kupers—by finding their opinions did not establish relevant
Eighth Amendment standards. Plaintiffs are again mistaken. The district
court merely concluded that these experts’ views about specific conditions
did not determine the Eighth Amendment’s standard for what conditions are
4
Courts are split as to whether the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, 18 U.S.C.
§ 3626, which Congress enacted after Farmer, positively forbids injunctive relief absent a
“current and ongoing” violation at the time of judgment. Compare Porter v. Clarke, 923
F.3d 348, 366–68 (4th Cir. 2019), as amended (May 6, 2019), and Thomas v. Bryant, 614 F.3d
1288, 1320 (11th Cir. 2010), with Hallett v. Morgan, 296 F.3d 732, 743–44 (9th Cir. 2002),
and Porter, 923 F.3d at 374–75 (Niemeyer, J., dissenting). Because we find the district court
properly denied injunctive relief regardless, we need not decide that question.
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cruel and unusual. 5 District courts have “ample discretion” to accord more
or less weight to parties’ evidence, including expert submissions. M.D. ex rel.
Stukenberg v. Abbott, 907 F.3d 237, 264 (5th Cir. 2018). We see no abuse of
the court’s discretion here.
AFFIRMED.
5
For example, the district court considered Dr. Kupers’s testimony that a prisoner
should not be held in solitary confinement for more than fifteen days but refused to adopt
a constitutional benchmark based on Dr. Kupers’s opinion, noting that longer periods of
continuous cell time had been upheld as constitutional.
8