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Parties Involved:
Board of County Commissioners of the County of Woodward
Not Party
Jeremy Cannon
Not Party
Jennifer Collison
Not Party
Gary Stanley
Appellant
Mandi Wright
Appellee

Document Text:

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 

FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT 

_________________________________ 

MANDI WRIGHT, individually and as 

Administrator of the Estate of Cory Wright, 

deceased, 

 Plaintiff - Appellee, 

v. 

JENNIFER COLLISON, in her individual 

capacity, JEREMY CANNON, in his 

individual capacity, GARY STANLEY, 

individually and in his official capacity as 

Sheriff of Woodward County, 

 Defendants - Appellants, 

and 

BOARD OF COUNTY 

COMMISSIONERS OF THE COUNTY 

OF WOODWARD, 

 Defendant. 

Nos. 15-6046, 15-6058 & 15-6123 

(D.C. No. 5:11-CV-01235-C) 

(W.D. Okla.) 

_________________________________ 

ORDER AND JUDGMENT*

_________________________________ 

Before HARTZ, BALDOCK, and HOLMES, Circuit Judges. 

_________________________________ 

 *

 After examining the briefs and appellate record, this panel has determined 

unanimously to honor the parties’ request for a decision on the briefs without oral 

argument. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(f); 10th Cir. R. 34.1(G). The case is therefore 

submitted without oral argument. This order and judgment is not binding precedent, 

except under the doctrines of law of the case, res judicata, and collateral estoppel. It 

may be cited, however, for its persuasive value consistent with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 

and 10th Cir. R. 32.1. 

FILED 

United States Court of Appeals 

Tenth Circuit 

June 2, 2016

Elisabeth A. Shumaker 

Clerk of Court

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Cory Wright was beaten by other inmates while in custody at the Woodward 

County Jail in Woodward, Oklahoma.1

 He brought suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against, 

among others, Sheriff Gary Stanley and jailers Jennifer Collison and Jeremy Cannon 

(Defendants). He died soon thereafter, and his widow and estate were substituted as 

plaintiffs; but for convenience we will refer to the plaintiff as Mr. Wright. Defendants 

appeal the district court’s orders denying their motions for summary judgment based on 

qualified immunity with respect to the claims against them in their personal capacities. 

We reverse and remand with directions to grant qualified immunity to Sheriff Stanley 

(appeal No. 15-6123) but affirm the denials of qualified immunity to Officer Collison 

(appeal No. 15-6046) and Officer Cannon (appeal No. 15-6058). 

I. BACKGROUND

 Because we are reviewing denials of motions for summary judgment based on 

qualified immunity, we rely on undisputed facts and the facts favoring Mr. Wright for 

which the district court determined there was sufficient evidence. See Henderson v. 

Glanz, 813 F.3d 938, 948 (10th Cir. 2015). Late on August 16, 2011, Mr. Wright was 

arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. His two passengers were arrested for 

public intoxication. Sheriff Stanley was the jail supervisor but he was not present that 

night. Officers Collison and Cannon were the jailers on duty when Mr. Wright was 

booked into the jail. Officer Collison was training Officer Cannon. 

 1

 A new Woodward County Jail opened about three months after Mr. Wright 

was beaten. 

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During the drive to the jail, Mr. Wright and Jeff Tindel, a passenger and coworker, 

had a disagreement arising out of concern that their arrest would cost them their jobs. 

After arriving at the jail, Mr. Wright told Officer Cannon that he and Mr. Tindel would 

fight if they were both placed in the drunk tank. Although jail policy was to place 

intoxicated inmates in the drunk tank separated from the general population, Officer 

Collison decided to place Mr. Wright in Cell 6 after Officer Cannon informed her of 

Mr. Wright’s statement that he and Mr. Tindel would fight. 

The jail was over capacity at the time. Cell 6 had an inmate capacity of four yet 

housed at least five inmates before Mr. Wright was placed there. When Officer Cannon 

approached Cell 6 with Mr. Wright, the inmates already in the cell threatened to harm 

Mr. Wright and told Officer Cannon not to put him in their cell. Officer Cannon told 

them to give him five minutes to find another cell for Mr. Wright. One of the inmates 

responded that five minutes would not work. Nevertheless, Officer Cannon (with Officer 

Collison present) placed Mr. Wright in Cell 6 and returned to the booking area. Less than 

a minute later, Officers Cannon and Collison heard a commotion and ran to the cell, 

where they found Mr. Wright on the floor with injuries to his face. Mr. Wright was 

treated at the hospital emergency room and released from the hospital and from jail 

custody on August 17. 

Mr. Wright alleges that Officers Collison and Cannon violated his constitutional 

rights by acting with deliberate indifference in failing to protect him from other inmates 

despite their threats to harm him. And he claims that Sheriff Stanley’s supervisory policy 

and practice of housing inmates in overcrowded cells, with actual knowledge that those 

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conditions posed a substantial risk of serious harm to inmates, caused his constitutional 

rights to be violated. 

II. APPLICABLE LAW 

A. Jurisdiction 

 Ordinarily we lack jurisdiction to hear appeals of denials of summary judgment 

because they are not final orders. See Henderson, 813 F.3d at 947. But denials of 

qualified immunity are different. “[Q]ualified immunity is an immunity from suit rather 

than a mere defense to liability. [I]t is effectively lost if a case is erroneously permitted 

to go to trial.” Brown v. Montoya, 662 F.3d 1152, 1161 (10th Cir. 2011) (ellipsis and 

internal quotation marks omitted). Therefore, we have jurisdiction over these 

interlocutory appeals. See Henderson, 813 F.3d at 947. Our review is limited, however, 

to “(1) whether the facts that the district court ruled a reasonable jury could find would 

suffice to show a legal violation, or (2) whether that law was clearly established at the 

time of the alleged violation.” Id. at 948 (internal quotation marks omitted). We do not 

have jurisdiction to determine “whether or not the pretrial record sets forth a ‘genuine’ 

issue of fact for trial,” id. (internal quotation marks omitted), although “even when the 

district court concludes issues of material fact exist, we [may review] the legal question 

of whether a defendant’s conduct, as alleged by the plaintiff, violates clearly established 

law,” Cox v. Glanz, 800 F.3d 1231, 1242 (10th Cir. 2015) (brackets and internal 

quotation marks omitted). That review is de novo. See Perez v. United Gov’t of 

Wyandotte Cty./Kan. City, 432 F.3d 1163, 1166 (10th Cir. 2005) (“If de novo review of 

the alleged facts demonstrates that they do not amount to a violation of a clearly 

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established right, we reverse a denial of summary judgment on qualified immunity 

grounds.”). “[W]e lack jurisdiction only if our review would require second-guessing the 

district court’s determinations of evidence sufficiency.” Cox, 800 F.3d at 1242 (internal 

quotation marks omitted). 

B. Qualified Immunity

 “When a defendant asserts qualified immunity at summary judgment, the burden 

shifts to the plaintiff to show that: (1) the defendant violated a constitutional right and 

(2) the constitutional right was clearly established. Only if the plaintiff has satisfied both 

steps is qualified immunity defeated.” Morris v. Noe, 672 F.3d 1185, 1191 (10th Cir. 

2012) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). We have discretion to determine 

which element to examine first. See Estate of Booker v. Gomez, 745 F.3d 405, 412 

(10th Cir. 2014). “To determine whether the right was clearly established, we ask 

whether the contours of a right are sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would 

have understood that what he is doing violates that right.” Id. at 411 (internal quotation 

marks omitted). A plaintiff may show that the law is clearly established “by identifying 

an on-point Supreme Court or published Tenth Circuit decision; alternatively, the clearly 

established weight of authority from other courts must have found the law to be as the 

plaintiff maintains.” Cox, 800 F.3d at 1247 (internal quotation marks omitted). The 

Supreme Court, however, has “repeatedly told courts not to define clearly established law 

at a high level of generality, since doing so avoids the crucial question whether the 

official acted reasonably in the particular circumstances that he or she faced.” Plumhoff 

v. Rickard, 134 S. Ct. 2012, 2023 (2014) (citation, ellipsis, and internal quotation marks 

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omitted); see Cox, 800 F.3d at 1247 n.8 (plaintiff cannot discharge his burden by relying 

on “authorities that do no more than establish general legal principles”). Therefore, “we 

have adopted a sliding scale: The more obviously egregious the conduct in light of 

prevailing constitutional principles, the less specificity is required from prior case law to 

clearly establish the violation.” Morris, 672 F.3d at 1196 (internal quotation marks 

omitted). 

C. Prisoner Safety

“Prison and jail officials, as well as the municipal entities that employ them, cannot 

absolutely guarantee the safety of their prisoners. Nonetheless, they have a constitutional 

duty to take reasonable steps to protect the prisoners’ safety and bodily integrity.” Cox, 

800 F.3d at 1247-48 (citation, brackets, and internal quotation marks omitted). 

Mr. Wright’s claims are governed by the Due Process Clause rather than the Eighth 

Amendment because Mr. Wright was a pretrial detainee. See Lopez v. LeMaster, 

172 F.3d 756, 759 n.2 (10th Cir. 1999). Even so, to determine whether Mr. Wright’s 

constitutional rights were violated, “we apply an analysis identical to that applied in 

Eighth Amendment cases brought pursuant to § 1983.” Id. “To establish a cognizable 

Eighth Amendment claim for failure to protect an inmate from harm by other inmates, the 

plaintiff must show that he [was] incarcerated under conditions posing a substantial risk 

of serious harm, the objective component, and that the prison official was deliberately 

indifferent to his safety, the subjective component.” Smith v. Cummings, 445 F.3d 1254, 

1258 (10th Cir. 2006) (brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). Regarding the 

subjective component, the plaintiff bears the burden to show that the defendants 

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responded in an “objectively unreasonable manner”—that is, they “knew of ways to 

reduce the harm but knowingly or recklessly declined to act.” Howard v. Waide, 

534 F.3d 1227, 1239 (10th Cir. 2008) (brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). 

III. DISCUSSION 

A. Sheriff Stanley 

We dispose of the claims against Sheriff Stanley on the clearly-established-law 

prong. “[W]e inquire whether, under [Mr. Wright’s] version of the facts, then-extant 

clearly established law would have given Sheriff [Stanley] fair warning that he could be 

held liable for his conduct under a supervisory-liability theory for violating [Mr. Wright’s 

due-process] rights.” Cox, 800 F.3d at 1247. 

The district court found the following facts to be uncontested or (if favorable to 

the nonmovant, Mr. Wright) supported by sufficient evidence: Inmate-on-inmate 

violence at the jail was rare and did not increase appreciably with overcrowding 

conditions, although overcrowding made the jail dangerous for the staff; overcrowding 

had been a recurring condition since at least 2008 and Sheriff Stanley was aware of this; 

between October 2007 and May 2011 the state health department cited the jail at least 

seven times for violations based in part on overcrowding; a 2009 report by a jail 

consultant stated, “The county jail is almost 32 years old. It is not safe for the jail staff or 

inmates. The jail does not meet any state jail standards, or state fire codes,” Aplt. App. 

(No. 15-6123) Vol. 14, at 268; in an effort to obtain funding for a new jail, Sheriff 

Stanley created and circulated a campaign flyer in 2009 describing the jail as 

overcrowded and asserting that a new jail was necessary to “PROTECT Inmates from 

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injuring each other and themselves,” id.; the jail was overcrowded for 896 days preceding 

the assault on Mr. Wright; at the time Mr. Wright was arrested, a new jail was being 

constructed, but it had not improved conditions at the existing jail; in 2009, Sheriff 

Stanley requested the local district attorney and a judge to reduce the amount of bonds on 

incoming inmates to help reduce overcrowding; between 2008 and August 2011, Sheriff 

Stanley contacted five other counties, once each, to ask if they could take overflow 

inmates, but did not contact any other nearby counties; in 2009 the Custer County Jail 

agreed to allow jail inmates to be housed there; the Woodward City Jail agreed to take a 

few inmates if it had room; and Sheriff Stanley “failed to utilize other interim measures, 

such as early release, bond reduction, and ankle monitor bracelets,” id. at 270. 

Although Sheriff Stanley argued that Mr. Wright had not presented evidence that 

the suggested remedies were feasible (and Mr. Wright has not disputed that a sheriff was 

required to take all prisoners brought for booking), the district court said it should not 

weigh the evidence on the matter. It concluded that Sheriff Stanley’s supervisory 

conduct could be considered unconstitutional because it was clearly established that 

“prison officials have a duty to protect prisoners from violence at the hands of other 

prisoners.” Id. at 275 (ellipsis and internal quotation marks omitted). But the law 

governing a sheriff’s obligations in these circumstances was not clearly established. The 

issue is whether case law existing as of August 2011 would alert any reasonable sheriff 

that he had a constitutional duty to reduce overcrowding by any of the measures 

suggested by Mr. Wright. But neither Mr. Wright nor the district court has cited such 

case law. Sheriff Stanley is entitled to qualified immunity. 

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B. Officers Collison and Cannon 

 The district court found sufficient evidence to support the following facts relevant 

to Mr. Wright’s claims against Officers Collison and Cannon: After Mr. Wright and his 

two coworkers arrived at the jail but before they were placed in cells, Mr. Wright told 

Officer Cannon that if he and Mr. Tindel were placed in the same cell, they would fight; 

Officer Collison decided to put Mr. Wright into Cell 6, rather than in the drunk tank with 

Mr. Tindel; Officer Cannon escorted Mr. Wright from the booking area to Cell 6; Officer 

Collison was present at the door to Cell 6 while Mr. Wright was placed in the cell; before 

Mr. Wright was put in Cell 6, the prisoners already there told Officers Collison and 

Cannon not to put Mr. Wright in Cell 6 and threatened to harm him; Officer Cannon told 

the inmates to give him five minutes to find another cell for Mr. Wright, to which one of 

them replied that five minutes would not work; Officer Cannon put Mr. Wright in Cell 6 

and headed for the booking area; and 45 seconds to one minute later, Officers Cannon 

and Collison heard fighting and yelling so they ran back to Cell 6, where they discovered 

Mr. Wright on the floor with facial injuries that required medical treatment. We 

recognize that Defendants point to contrary evidence, such as Officer Cannon’s assertion 

that he did not hear any of the Cell 6 inmates threaten to harm Mr. Wright. But we do not 

weigh the evidence. 

 Given the district court’s determination of what facts are adequately supported by 

evidence, we must affirm its ruling on qualified immunity. At the time of Mr. Wright’s 

beating, the law was clearly settled that prison authorities had a constitutional obligation 

to act to protect a prisoner who had been plausibly threatened with serious harm by 

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fellow inmates. See, e.g., Howard, 534 F.3d at 1235-37. A defendant is not entitled to 

qualified immunity simply because the threat and the surrounding circumstances in his or 

her case are not identical to those in any precedent. If the evidence reveals that the threat 

of serious injury is plausible, the duty to protect is clear. As for whether Officers 

Collison and Cannon acted with deliberate indifference, we believe that a reasonable 

juror could believe that their decision to put Mr. Wright in the cell, rather than keeping 

him in their custody while deciding where best to place him, showed not just negligence 

but the requisite recklessness. We therefore affirm the court’s denial of the 

qualified-immunity motions by Officers Collison and Cannon. 

IV. CONCLUSION 

 We reverse the district court’s denial of qualified immunity to Sheriff Stanley, but 

affirm its denial of relief to Officers Collison and Cannon. 

Entered for the Court 

Harris L Hartz 

Circuit Judge 

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