[DO NOT PUBLISH]

In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Eleventh Circuit

____________________

No. 23-12435

Non-Argument Calendar

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MICHAEL D. POPE, JR., 

Plaintiff-Appellant,

versus

WARREN COOK, 

REGINALD RAMBO, 

CARL SANDERS, 

Defendants-Appellees.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Northern District of Alabama

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D.C. Docket No. 2:21-cv-00467-LSC

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Before WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge, and NEWSOM and ANDERSON, 

Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM:

Michael Pope, Jr., an Alabama prisoner, appeals the summary judgment in favor of correctional officers Warren Cook and 

Reginald Rambo and against Pope’s complaint that the officers 

failed to protect him in violation of the Eighth Amendment. 42 

U.S.C. § 1983. Pope argues that the evidence is sufficient to permit 

a reasonable jury to infer that Cook and Rambo were complicit in 

two separate attacks against him. We affirm.

We view the evidence in the light most favorable to Pope as 

the nonmoving party. Lee v. Ferraro, 284 F.3d 1188, 1190 (11th Cir. 

2002). Pope was an inmate at a maximum-security state prison on 

September 16, 2020, when officers Cook and Rambo were passing 

meal trays to inmates in the V block, which housed “inmates with 

many past rule violations and potential mental health issues.” The 

meal tray door on Pope’s cell door had been “stuck” for weeks and 

would not open. Although Rambo could slide the tray under the 

cell door, he testified that he opened the door to hand the tray to 

Pope because sliding the tray on the ground, which often was 

flooded and contaminated with bodily fluids and waste, would be 

disrespectful. Rambo instructed the operators in the control room,

or “cube,” to open Pope’s cell and, in the process of handing Pope 

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the tray, inmate DeMarkules Williams ran up behind Rambo, 

reached around him, and stabbed Pope in the neck and head two 

or three times with a homemade weapon. Rambo pushed Pope 

into his cell and Williams retreated to his cell, which was two cells 

away and had no direct line of sight to Pope’s cell. Cook helped 

secure Williams, and Pope received treatment at the infirmary. 

No one knew how Williams escaped his cell. Rambo and 

Pope testified that they believed that Williams opened his own cell 

door because he had a “trick” in it. A “trick” is a small object such 

as a piece of metal or plastic placed in the lock to obstruct the locking mechanism. Officers performed security checks during their 

shifts by pulling on each cell door to ensure the door was locked, 

but Lieutenant Carl Sanders and Rambo explained that some inmates could fashion a tool to pry the doors open. 

Pope denied having any information to suggest that Rambo 

or Cook thought that Williams might attack him and denied knowing Williams. Pope believed that Rambo pushed him into his cell 

to stop him from being stabbed, and Pope did not think that Rambo 

wanted him to be stabbed by Williams. 

Two months later, on November 24, another inmate, 

Adrian Dunning, stabbed Pope on the exercise yard. Dunning 

slipped out of his handcuffs, walked up behind Pope, and stabbed 

him in the arm, neck, and chest with a six-inch metal blade. Cook 

yelled and ran over to Dunning, who dropped the knife and laid on 

the ground. Dunning told Cook that Pope “kn[ew] why” he 

stabbed him and admitted to having the knife, but Dunning refused 

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to answer whether he had a handcuff key. Pope received stitches 

for his wounds at the infirmary. Rambo was not on the yard during 

the attack, but Pope blamed him for the attack because he believed 

that Rambo was responsible for retrieving Dunning from his cell 

and failing to search him. 

Rambo and Cook testified that there was a three-step protocol for searching inmates on the way to the exercise yard. One officer would handcuff the inmate at the cell door, pat-search him, 

and double lock the handcuffs. A second officer would stand at the 

stairwell and place ankle chains on the inmate. A third officer 

would stand at the door leading to the yard and wave a handheld 

metal detector over each inmate. Sanders testified that inmates 

sometimes slipped out of their handcuffs by using a piece of metal 

to manipulate the cuffs into opening. 

On the day of the second attack, Rambo was responsible for 

patting down inmates, and Cook was responsible for wanding over 

them with the metal detector. Rambo testified that the metal detector was a “hit or miss,” and sometimes the officer using the 

metal detector might not catch hidden weapons. Rambo explained 

that officers would pat down “arms and legs and stuff” but that they 

“can’t touch [an inmate’s] private area” because of the Prison Rape 

Elimination Act, “so a lot of times [officers] can miss a knife” that 

inmates hide there. After the attack, Dunning wrote a statement 

admitting that “Rambo shook [him] down and a knife was around 

[his] dick.” 

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Rambo and Cook testified that they knew of no animosity 

between Pope and Dunning. Pope testified that he did not think 

that Cook had anything against him, and he did not believe that 

Cook thought that Dunning might stab him. Pope also testified 

that he did not know Dunning before the attack. 

The officers moved for summary judgment and argued that 

no reasonable jury could find that they knew that there was a substantial risk that Pope would be attacked. Pope responded that a 

reasonable jury could infer that Rambo and Cook were complicit 

in the attacks because neither attack should have been possible to 

carry out without their assistance. Pope argued that the attack by 

Williams could not have occurred without Rambo choosing to 

open Pope’s cell door instead of sliding his meal tray under the 

door and without someone unlocking Williams’s cell and telling

him exactly when Pope’s cell door, which could not be seen from 

Williams’s cell, would open. He asserted that Rambo wrote in his 

post-incident statement that Williams pushed him, but during Williams’s disciplinary hearing, Rambo stated that Williams reached 

around him, and this discrepancy, which Rambo testified was due 

to post-attack adrenaline, revealed that Rambo was trying to protect Williams. Pope also argued that, considering the extensive 

search protocol, Dunning could not have carried a knife onto the 

yard without Rambo and Cook helping him, and he argued that it 

was unusual for an inmate to admit to hiding a knife from officers 

after using it during an attack. 

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The district court granted the officers’ motion for summary 

judgment. It ruled that Pope failed to provide enough context for 

his argument that the attacks were impossible without the officers’ 

assistance and rejected his theory of complicity because it lacked 

evidentiary support. It explained that, in the context of a violent

maximum-security prison, inferring complicity without adequate

context would be too speculative and would undermine the deliberate-indifference standard. 

We review a summary judgment de novo. Caldwell v. Warden, 

FCI Talladega, 748 F.3d 1090, 1098 (11th Cir. 2014). Summary judgment is appropriate when the evidence, viewed in the light most 

favorable to the non-moving party, “presents no genuine issue of 

material fact and compels judgment as a matter of law in favor of 

the moving party.” Id.

Pope argues that a reasonable jury could infer that Rambo 

and Cook were complicit in the attacks, but we disagree. To prove 

that an officer failed to protect a prisoner from violence at the 

hands of other prisoners, the prisoner must prove the officer’s deliberate indifference to a known, substantial risk of harm caused 

the inmate to suffer serious harm. Nelson v. Tompkins, 89 F.4th 1289, 

1298 (11th Cir. 2024). Deliberate indifference has a subjective and 

objective component. Id. at 1297. The subjective component “requires that the defendant officer actually (subjectively) knew of the 

risk to the plaintiff inmate,” and the objective component “requires 

evidence that the officer disregarded the known risk by failing to 

respond to it in an (objectively) reasonable manner.” Id. (internal 

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quotation marks omitted, alterations adopted). Pope failed to establish the subjective component of this standard. 

A reasonable jury could not infer that the attacks were impossible without Rambo and Cook aiding them. Starting with the 

Williams attack, Pope argues that it was impossible for Williams to 

escape his cell without help because Rambo checked the cells earlier in the day, and Williams could not have known when to run 

up behind Rambo without some assistance because Williams could 

not see Pope’s cell from his own cell. But the record does not support this inference. Even Pope testified that he believed that Williams “tricked” his cell door, and Rambo and Sanders testified that 

some inmates make special tools to unlock their doors. And Pope 

offers no evidence that Rambo choosing to hand him a meal tray 

instead of sliding the meal tray across a possibly-contaminated floor 

through a small opening below the cell door was unusual. It is undisputed that Pope’s meal tray slot had been inoperable for at least 

a few weeks. Moreover, it is undisputed that Rambo asked the operators in the “cube” to unlock Pope’s cell door, and Williams’s cell 

was only two doors away and within earshot of Rambo’s instruction. The evidence does not support Pope’s theory that the only 

way Williams could have known when to escape was to receive

inside help from Rambo and Cook. 

Pope makes much of the fact that Rambo’s initial report 

stated that Williams pushed him. But Pope and Cook both testified 

consistently with Rambo’s statement at the disciplinary hearing 

and during his deposition that Williams ran up behind Rambo and 

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reached around him to attack Pope. Moreover, Pope testified that 

he had no reason to believe that Rambo wanted him to be hurt. 

On this record, no reasonable jury could find Rambo and 

Cook liable for the Dunning attack either. Rambo testified that his 

pat downs avoided inmates’ genitals because of concerns about sexual harassment complaints. Dunning admitted that he was able to 

get the knife past Rambo by hiding the knife in his crotch. Pope 

does not argue, nor could he, that it was the mere failure to discover the knife that makes Rambo or Cook complicit in Dunning’s 

use of it. Although Pope argues that Cook should have found the 

metal knife with the metal detector, no evidence established that 

the metal detector or its use was failproof. Rambo testified that the 

metal detector was sensitive, but he and Cook also explained that 

weapons still made it out onto the yard. And even if Cook was negligent in using the detector, that negligence, without more, fails to 

establish that Cook actually knew that Dunning was hiding a knife 

and would attack Pope. See id. And no evidence would permit a 

jury to infer that Rambo or Cook helped Dunning to slip out of his 

handcuffs on the yard instead of Dunning slipping out of his handcuffs on his own. Because the record does not support Pope’s contention that the attacks could not have occurred without help from 

Rambo and Cook, and the evidence otherwise is insufficient to establish that either officer knew that the attacks would happen, the 

inferences that would be necessary in these circumstances to impose liability on the officers are unreasonable as a matter of law.

We AFFIRM the summary judgment in favor of the officers.

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