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Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

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, - FI LED 

United Scates Court of Appeals 

Tenth Circuit 

UNITED STATES COURT OF 

TENTH CIRCUIT 

APPEALS NOV 2 8 1990 

ROBERT L. HOECKER 

Clerk 

ATWARD JEFFERSON HARBUCK, SR., ) 

and JACKIE PETTIJOHN, ) 

individually and as Special ) 

Representatives of the Estate of) 

ATWARD JEFFERSON HARBUCK, JR., ) 

deceased, ) 

) 

Plaintiff-Appellants, ) 

) 

v. ) 

) 

GLEN WALLACE, individually ) 

and as Acting Superintendent ) 

of Western State Hospital, ) 

owned and operated by the State) 

of Oklahoma; FRANK JAMES, ) 

individually and as Commissioner) 

of Mental Health of the State ) 

of Oklahoma; JOHN DOE and ) 

RICHARD ROE, whose identities ) 

are unknown to Plaintiffs, and ) 

the STATE OF OKLAHOMA, ) 

) 

Defendant-Appellees. ) 

No. 90-6160 

(D.C. No. Civ-86-2743-P) 

(W.D. Okla.) 

ORDER AND JUDGMENT* 

Before ANDERSON, BALDOCK, and EBEL, Circuit Judges. 

After examining the briefs and appellate record, this panel 

has determined unanimously that oral argument would not materially 

assist the determination of this appeal. See Fed. R. App. P. 

* This order and judgment has no precedential value and shall not 

be cited, or used by any court within the Tenth Circuit, except 

for purposes of establishing the doctrines of the law of the case, 

res judicata, or collateral estoppal. 10th Cir. R. 36.3. 

Appellate Case: 90-6160 Document: 010110051370 Date Filed: 11/28/1990 Page: 1 
- .r 

34(a); 10th Cir. R. 34.1.9. Therefore, the case is ordered 

submitted without oral argument. 

This is a civil rights action filed by the survivors of 

Atward Jefferson Harbuck, Jr., who died while under emergency 

detention at Western State Hospital -- a mental institution in 

Oklahoma. Although the cause of death was determined to be 

suicide, relatives of the decedent brought this§ 1983 action 

alleging that unknown defendant employees at Western State 

overpowered Harbuck and hanged him. In the alternative, 

plaintiffs alleged that defendants Glen Wallace, Acting 

Superintendent of Western State Hospital, and Frank James, 

Oklahoma Commissioner of Mental Health, failed to properly train, 

discipline, and supervise their employees regarding the care and 

treatment of mental patients, and that such failure proximately 

caused the deprivation of Harbuck's fifth and fourteenth amendment 

rights. The district court, Phillips, J., granted summary 

judgment in favor of the named defendants, concluding that they 

enjoyed qualified immunity. Plaintiffs (prose) appeal the lower 

court's decision. We affirm the district court. 

In reviewing the granting of a summary judgment motion, 

appellate court's are directed to apply the same standard that the 

district court applied below. Russell v. American State Insurance 

Company, 813 F.2d 306 (10th Cir. 1987). Specifically, the court 

must construe the facts presented in a light most favorable to the 

non-moving party -- in this case, the plaintiffs. 

As the district court noted below, this case turns on whether 

the named defendants enjoyed qualified immunity from suit. 

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Appellate Case: 90-6160 Document: 010110051370 Date Filed: 11/28/1990 Page: 2 
According to Coen v. Runner, 854 F.2d 374 (10th Cir. 1988), 

Qualified immunity is an affirmative defense that 

protects government officials from personal liability 

unless their actions violate clearly established law of 

which a reasonable person would have known. Once the 

defense has been raised and the plaintiffs have met 

their burden of identifying both the clearly established 

law that the government official is alleged to have 

violated and the conduct that is alleged to have 

violated that law, the defendant must demonstrate that 

no material issues of fact remain as to whether his or 

her actions were objectively reasonable in light of the 

law and the information he or she possessed at the time. 

A defendant who makes such a showing of objective 

reasonableness is entitled to summary judgment unless 

the plaintiff can demonstrate that there are factual 

disputes relevant to the defendant's claim to immunity. 

Id. at 377 (emphasis added) (citations omitted). The district 

court concluded that Youngberg v. Romero, 457 U.S. 307, 315 

(1982), clearly established that mental patients have 

constitutionally protected liberty interests in safety, freedom of 

movement, and adequate habitation. However, the district court 

also concluded that the actions of the superintendent and 

commissioner were not unreasonable in light of the law and the 

information they possessed at the time. Specifically, the 

district court found it "undisputed that the staff training and 

development program of the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health 

was consistent with sound professional standards." R. Doc. 29 at 

19. There is ample testimony in the record to support this 

conclusion. 

In order to escape summary judgment, therefore, plaintiffs 

had the burden of demonstrating that there were indeed factual 

disputes relevant to the defendant's claim to immunity. Coen, 854 

F.2d at 377. Like the district court, we find that the plaintiffs 

failed to meet that burden. Although plaintiffs did "take issue" 

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Appellate Case: 90-6160 Document: 010110051370 Date Filed: 11/28/1990 Page: 3 
with defendants' categorization of Harbuck's death as suicide, 

they offered nothing to suggest that the named defendants 

unreasonably screened, hired or trained employees. Instead, they 

simply alleged that "defendants harbored among their subordinates 

brutal and calloused people capable of murder" and inferred from 

this allegation "that these officials failed to properly train and 

supervise their subordinates .. II Pl. Response to Def.'s Motion 

for Summary Judgment, R. Doc. 25 at 6. Such an inference is not 

enough. Indeed, plaintiffs all but acknowledged their lack of a 

factual dispute when they asserted that "we are at least entitled 

to proceed with discovery to the extent of either creating, or 

failing to create, an issue on which the Court is able to make a 

determination." Id. at 8. 

Since the plaintiffs have not established a factual dispute 

with regard to defendants' conduct, we believe that the district 

court was justified in granting summary judgment. 1 We further 

conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion by 

denying plaintiffs further discovery. As we noted in Sil-Flo, 

1 This case can be distinguished from Garrett v. Rader, 831 F.2d 

202, 205 (10th Cir. 1987), in which the mother of a retarded child 

brought suit against the Oklahoma Director of Human Services and 

the superintendent of the particular state institution upon 

allegations that her daughter had died as a result of defendants 

failure to properly hire and train employees. Unlike Garrett, the 

defendants here demonstrated that Western State's hiring and 

training policies were consistent with sound professional 

practices. Moreover, there was no suggestion that defendants here 

knew of or failed to respond to a "long standing history of 

neglect and physical abuse ••• at the institution." Id. at 205. 

Although plaintiffs cited to a series of newspaper articles 

exposing conditions at mental institutions in Oklahoma, these 

articles concerned a different hospital and came to light more 

than four years after the Harbuck incident. Plaintiffs have 

therefore raised no facts calling into question the reasonableness 

of defendants' activities. 

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Appellate Case: 90-6160 Document: 010110051370 Date Filed: 11/28/1990 Page: 4 
Inc. v. SFHC, Inc., Oct. 30, 1990, WESTLAW 1990 WL 164055, "the 

district court has wide discretion in its regulation of pretrial 

matters .•. [so that the) trial court's decision will not be 

disturbed unless the appellate court has a definite and firm 

conviction that the lower court made a clear error of judgment or 

exceeded the bounds of permissible choice in the circumstances." 

We can find nothing to dispute the district court's conclusion 

that "[p)laintiffs . had nine months within which to complete 

discovery and have not alleged that they were in any manner 

prohibited from doing so." Order at 13. Thus, while we feel 

great sympathy for the plaintiffs' loss, we nevertheless must 

conclude that summary judgment was properly granted with regard to 

these defendants. We AFFIRM. 

Entered for the Court 

David M. Ebel 

Circuit Judge 

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