Opinion ID: 392171
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Tool Control

Text: 33 Murphy's attackers stabbed him 16 times and beat him; a doctor testified that the beating may have been administered with a blunt instrument. Tr. 5/8/79 at 333. There is no question but that the inmates should not have had access to such weapons; there is also no question that prison inmates typically strive and often manage to find, steal, or create many such weapons. 49 Appellant argued that the officials at Lorton Youth Center I did not use their best efforts to prevent inmates from possessing weapons, but in fact violated both their own regulations and the prevailing standard of care by failing to maintain adequate tool control, search, and shakedown procedures. The resultant access to weapons, he claimed, proximately caused his injuries. 50 34 The Youth Center had detailed regulations governing tool access, tool return, and tool inventories to prevent inmates from utilizing tools as weapons. 51 The appellant's expert testified that these regulations were adequate; 52 however, he also testified that as far as he could tell from the correctional officers' preceding testimony, the staff had failed to follow them. He repeatedly stressed the need for, 53 and in this institution apparent lack of, a tool inventory as the linchpin of an adequate tool control system. Appellant had requested in his interrogatories the records of all tools listed as missing during the years 1973-78. However, the District responded that it had no such records. 54 At trial, it was argued that this response meant only that the information did not exist in the form requested; 55 one officer testified that lists of missing tools had been kept for these years but had since been destroyed as obsolete. 56 Two other officers denied all knowledge of a tool inventory or any other record of tools extant at or missing from the institution. 57 The court refused to issue a subpoena for any existing tool inventories, in whatever form, at trial. 58 Hence there was evidence before the jury that no inventory existed and no definitive proof that it did. The absence of such an inventory might well have been relied upon by the jury as evidence of the lack of an adequate tool control program, a program necessary, according to appellant's expert, to reasonably insure inmates' safety. 35 The expert witness also testified that regular searches and shakedowns of the institution were essential for adequate tool control. 59 He specifically stated that for a search to be effective, inmates must be searched along with their rooms. 60 However, one correctional officer testified that when he conducted searches at Lorton Youth Center I, he searched only rooms, and allowed the inmate to stand in the hall where it was possible for him to pass contraband to his fellow inmates. 61 One correctional officer testified that he did not remember conducting the number of room searches and shakedowns required by the Center's regulations. 62 36 The attack on Murphy was perpetrated by armed inmates; without weapons of some sort, his attackers could not have inflicted the multiple stab wounds. Evidence existed from which a reasonable jury could have concluded that Lorton Youth Center's tool control program, designed to keep weapons out of inmates' hands precisely to forestall this type of attack, had been ignored by several guards in Murphy's dormitory. Where evidence of the failure to adhere to a reasonable standard of care exists, and the injury which has in fact occurred is precisely the sort of thing that proper care on the part of the defendant would be intended to prevent, not only is the existence of proximate cause a jury question, but the court can ... allow a certain liberality to the jury in drawing its conclusion. W. Prosser, Law of Torts 243 (4th ed. 1971).