Opinion ID: 2972579
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: assertion of qualified immunity by mason,

Text: AN EMPLOYEE OF A PRIVATE MEDICAL PROVIDER
When the district court rejects an official’s assertion of qualified immunity, it makes a purely legal determination, which we review de novo. See Solomon, 389 F.3d at 172; Scott, 377 F.3d at 569; Tucker, 388 F.3d at 219; Virgili, 272 F.3d at 392.
At all relevant times, Larry Mason was a physicians’ assistant, privately employed by Emergency Medicine Consultants, P.C., (EMC), and assigned to work at Dwayne Waters Hospital. Mason, however, concedes that he was a private employee acting “under color of state law” and that, absent some form of immunity, he would be subject to liability pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Although Mason sought the protections of qualified immunity, the district court held, as a matter of law, that a private practitioner in Mason’s position was not entitled to qualified immunity. On appeal, Mason argues the district court erred because, he says, a proper consideration of all of the relevant factors reveals that a private practitioner in his position should benefit from qualified immunity. Therefore, in this appeal, we must determine whether a privately employed physicians’ assistant, assigned to a state prison hospital, may seek the protections of qualified immunity against a prisoner alleging a constitutional violation pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983. 19 No. 03-2446 / 03-2461 The Supreme Court provided guidance on examining this issue in Richardson v. McKnight, 521 U.S. 399 (1997). In that case, the Court determined that prison guards who were employed by a private prison management firm were not entitled to qualified immunity against a prisoner charging a § 1983 violation. The Court instructed in Richardson that we must consider two factors in determining whether private defendants enjoy qualified immunity: (1) whether “history . . . reveal[s] a ‘firmly rooted’ tradition of immunity” that is applicable to the private defendants, id. at 404, and (2) whether the “purposes” underlying the doctrine of qualified immunity warrant immunity for the defendants at issue, id. at 407-08. The Richardson Court concluded that its “examination of history and purpose . . . reveal[ed] nothing special enough about the job or about its organizational structure that would warrant providing . . . private prison guards with a governmental immunity.” Id. at 412. Applying these factors in the present case, this court must first decide whether the common law reveals a history of according qualified immunity to privately employed prison medical providers. In support of his claim that private prison doctors enjoyed immunity at common law, Mason cites as his sole authority a single passage from Richardson, in which the Supreme Court acknowledged the following: Apparently the law did provide a kind of immunity for certain private defendants, such as doctors or lawyers who performed services at the behest of the sovereign. Id. at 407. Mason’s reliance on this passage is unavailing. In Hinson v. Edmond, 192 F.3d 1342 (11th Cir. 1999), the Eleventh Circuit addressed this specific argument. In addition to noting that the Supreme Court had mentioned a “kind of immunity” for doctors who performed services at the 20 No. 03-2446 / 03-2461 behest of the sovereign only “in passing,” id. at 1345, the Eleventh Circuit also determined the following: The sources cited by the [Richardson] Court suggest that, under certain circumstances, English doctors and lawyers were immune from liability for acts amounting to negligence. For acts amounting to recklessness or intentional wrongdoing, as are alleged here, immunity did not exist, however. Id. at 1345-46. Deliberate indifference claims, of course, must be premised upon something more than mere negligence. Johnson v. Karnes, 398 F.3d 868, 875 (6th Cir. 2005) (noting that “a plaintiff alleging deliberate indifference must show more than negligence”).3 In Jensen v. Lane County, 222 F.3d 570 (9th Cir. 2000), the Ninth Circuit held that a privately employed psychiatrist was not entitled assert qualified immunity in a suit brought by a plaintiff who had been involuntarily committed to the county psychiatric hospital. Additionally, a number of district courts have held that privately employed prison medical personnel are not entitled to assert qualified immunity. See Bafford v. Simmons, Nos. 99-3158-JWL, 00-3023-JWL, 2002 WL 1462072 (D. Kan. Jun. 26, 2002) (denying qualified immunity to privately employed prison doctor); Parreant v. Schotzko, No. 00-2014 JRT/JGL, 2001 WL 1640137 (D. Minn. Sept. 30, 2001) (same); Wolfe v. Horn, 130 F. Supp. 2d 648 (E.D. Pa. 2001) (same); Nelson v. Prison Health Servs., Inc., 3 In addition, in support of his claim against Mason, Cook relies upon Warner v. Grand County, 57 F.3d 962, 967 (10th Cir. 1995), in which the Tenth Circuit opined that the phrase “performed services at the behest of the sovereign” more accurately is limited to a situation where a private practitioner acts upon a specific and limited request from the state. The Tenth Circuit reasoned that under such circumstance a private practitioner who performs a governmental function pursuant to a specific request by a governmental official is entitled to qualified immunity because the state official would have benefitted from qualified immunity had he performed the function himself. Id. We agree. 21 No. 03-2446 / 03-2461 991 F. Supp. 1452 (M.D. Fla. 1997) (denying qualified immunity to privately employed prison nurses); McDuffe v. Hopper, 982 F. Supp. 817 (M.D. Ala. 1997) (denying immunity to privately employed prison psychiatrists and psychologist). We therefore conclude that there is no firmly rooted history at common law of according qualified immunity to privately employed prison medical providers. Hence, Mason has failed to satisfy the first factor in determining whether a private individual is entitled to the protections of qualified immunity. Mason has also failed to satisfy the second factor because the purposes underlying the doctrine of qualified immunity do not warrant granting immunity for privately employed prison medical providers. In Richardson, the Supreme Court noted three purposes upon which it has based qualified immunity for government officials charged with liability under § 1983. Qualified immunity (1) protects the government’s ability to perform its traditional functions without “unwarranted timidity,” 521 U.S. at 407-08, (2) “ensures that talented candidates are not deterred by the threat of damages suits from entering public service,” id. at 411, and (3) guards against the propensity of lawsuits to distract government employees from their duties. id. Nonetheless, with regard to this third purpose concerning distraction, the Court noted in Richardson that “the risk of distraction alone cannot be sufficient grounds for an immunity.” Id. As for the first two purposes cited by the Court, we can discern no sufficiently meaningful distinction between the private prison management firms at issue in Richardson and the private prison medical providers at issue in the case at bar. Most notably, with regard to the first purpose of protecting traditional government functions from “unwarranted timidity,” which the Supreme 22 No. 03-2446 / 03-2461 Court stated is “the most important special government immunity-producing concern,” id. at 409, the Court held that such timidity “is less likely present, or at least is not special, when a private company subject to competitive market pressures operates a prison,” id. The Supreme Court found that the private prison management firm’s performance was “disciplined, not only by state review, but also by pressure from potentially competing firms who can try to take its place.” Id. at 410. Moreover, the Court stated, “[M]arketplace pressures provide the private firm with strong incentives to avoid overly timid, insufficiently vigorous, unduly fearful, or ‘nonarduous’ employee job performance.” Id. All of these principles apply to the private medical provider firm at issue in the present case. Mason argues that his situation is distinguishable because he was assigned to a state prison hospital and was required to abide by the same guidelines and regulations as state-employed personnel, therefore his actions were controlled by state supervision, pursuant to which he is entitled to qualified immunity. Mason’s private employer, EMS, however, was subcontracted to MDOC through Correctional Medical Services (CMS), a separate private enterprise. Thus, Mason is effectively two steps removed from direct state supervision and can hardly be said to be controlled by the state. Inasmuch as Mason’s employer, EMS, is accountable to another private entity, CMS, rather than to the State of Michigan, surely the marketplace pressures that attend Mason’s functions carry even more weight. We turn lastly to the second purpose for qualified immunity as set forth in Richardson - that it “ensures that talented candidates are not deterred by the threat of damages suits from entering 23 No. 03-2446 / 03-2461 public service.” For the reasons discussed above, we conclude that this factor does not apply to Mason as he is privately employed by a company clearly subject to marketplace pressures. Our examination of the history and purposes of qualified immunity does not reveal anything sufficiently special about the work of private prison medical providers that would warrant providing such providers with governmental immunity. Accordingly we agree with the district court that Mason is not protected by the doctrine of qualified immunity.