Gary Meeks v. J Parsons ( 2011 )

FILED
NOT FOR PUBLICATION MAY 16 2011
MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS U .S. C O U R T OF APPE ALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
GARY B. MEEKS, No. 10-15612
Plaintiff - Appellant, D.C. No. 1:03-cv-06700-OWW-
GSA
v.
JOHN PARSONS, MEMORANDUM *
Defendant - Appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Eastern District of California
Oliver W. Wanger, Senior District Judge, Presiding
Submitted May 11, 2011 **
San Francisco, California
Before: GOULD and M. SMITH, Circuit Judges, and GERTNER, District Judge.***
After suffering a serious jaw injury, former Centinela State Prison inmate
Gary Meeks brought a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 suit against John Parsons, the prison
*
This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent
except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.
**
The panel unanimously concludes this case is suitable for decision
without oral argument. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(a)(2).
*** The Honorable Nancy Gertner, United States District Judge for the
District of Massachusetts, sitting by designation.
doctor who oversaw his medical care, alleging deliberate indifference to his
medical needs in violation of his Eighth Amendment rights. After a five-day trial,
the jury returned a verdict for Parsons. Meeks appeals three of the district court’s
trial decisions: (1) excluding evidence of Parsons’s prior terminations for slow
patient care; (2) excluding evidence of the statewide Medical Services Delivery
Plan; and (3) instructing the jury to give deference to prison security policies and
practices. We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291, and we affirm.
The district court did not abuse its discretion in excluding from evidence,
pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 403, both Parsons’s prior terminations and
the Medical Services Delivery Plan. “‘As long as it appears from the record as a
whole that the trial judge adequately weighed the probative value and prejudicial
effect of proffered evidence before its admission, we conclude that the demands of
Rule 403 have been met.’” Boyd v. City & Cnty. of S.F., 576 F.3d 938, 948 (9th
Cir. 2009) (quoting United States v. Verduzco, 373 F.3d 1022, 1029 n.2 (9th Cir.
2004)). The district court reasonably concluded that Parsons’s prior terminations,
which arose from circumstances unrelated to this case, might give an unwarranted
suggestion of misconduct on all of Parsons’s treatment decisions. Also, the district
court reasonably concluded that admission of the Medical Services Delivery Plan
as a trial exhibit might give rise to the unfair inference that Parsons knew of and
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understood the document but ignored its recommendations. For this reason, the
district court, though excluding the document itself, permitted Meeks to cross-
examine Parsons on his understanding of its contents. This decision was well
within the district court’s “broad discretion in controlling the conduct of a trial . . .
[and in] exercis[ing] reasonable control over the presentation of evidence and
interrogation of witnesses.” Penk v. Or. State Bd. of Higher Educ., 816 F.2d 458,
465 (9th Cir. 1987) (internal citations and quotations omitted).
The district court did not err by instructing the jury to give deference to
prison security policies and practices. In Norwood v. Vance, we held that juries
should be instructed to give deference to prison officials’ adoption and execution
of policies and practices for discipline and security when those policies and
practices are at issue in prisoner “conditions of confinement” cases. 591 F.3d
1062, 1066–67 (9th Cir. 2010). Because this is a “conditions of confinement”
case, see Wilson v. Seiter, 501 U.S. 294, 303 (1991) (“[T]he medical care a
prisoner receives is just as much a ‘condition’ of his confinement as the food he is
fed, the clothes he is issued, the temperature he is subjected to in his cell, and the
protection he is afforded against other inmates.”), the district court’s instruction
properly applied Norwood. Even if we were to distinguish Norwood to exclude
cases about medical care from the scope of its holding, as Meeks urges, the district
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court’s error would have been harmless. Given the jury’s rejection of Meeks’s
main argument that Parsons delayed and protracted Meeks’s care to avoid the hard
work required to treat Meeks effectively, the wisdom of Centinela’s security
policies and Parsons’s execution of those policies was more probably than not
irrelevant to the jury’s verdict and thus harmless. See Clem v. Lomeli, 566 F.3d
1177, 1182 (9th Cir. 2009).
AFFIRMED.
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