Opinion ID: 148261
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Emergency Training Provided to Staff

Text: Finally, Davis contends the jail staff was inadequately trained to handle emergency situations such as the fire. According to Davis, Sheriff Ward did not conduct fire drills with his staff, nor did the staff receive any other emergency training. Davis again claims the district court's failure to acknowledge this issue was improper. Standish is again instructive on this issue. As noted above, the inmate in Standish asserted the jail lacked sufficient emergency procedures. Id. at 191. The court did not hold this fact to be dispositive of the deliberate indifference inquiry. Id. at 192. Even if Davis is correct and Sheriff Ward should have engaged his officers in more exhaustive emergency training, this failure does not constitute deliberate indifference. Jackson v. Everett, 140 F.3d 1149, 1153 (8th Cir.1998) ([The defendant's] failure to take additional security measures, even if arguably negligent, cannot constitute reckless disregard of a known risk.). In support of his argument, Davis cites White v. Cooper, 55 F.Supp.2d 848, 858 (N.D.Ill.1999), which held the defendants knew that consciously disregarding a non-operational fire safety and prevention system in a state prison ... would violate an inmate's most basic and established constitutional rights. Davis omits the full quote from White, however, which states the defendants' disregard of the non-operational system  and failing to free a man from his burning prison cell would violate an inmates most basic and established constitutional rights. Id. (emphasis added). In this case, not only were there operable smoke detectors, unlike White, but it is undisputed that the officers reacted to remove the inmates from the jail cells after they discovered the fire. In this sense, even if Davis is correct that the officers' lack of training and the jail's lack of fire safety systems presented a substantial risk, the officers' subsequent conduct demonstrates they did not disregard the risk. Gregoire v. Class, 236 F.3d 413, 417 (8th Cir.2000) (Lastly, even if an official knows of a risk, he is not liable for a subsequent injury if he responded reasonably to the known risk.) (citing Farmer, 511 U.S. at 844, 114 S.Ct. 1970). The other cases Davis relies upon are also distinguishable. In Women Prisoners v. District of Columbia, 877 F.Supp. 634 (D.D.C.1994), the court found the living conditions presented a constitutional violation because the dormitories were heavily overcrowded, could not contain fire within any room, only contained one unlocked fire exit, and had no fire alarm system or sprinkler system. In Carty v. Farrelly, 957 F.Supp. 727, 737 (D.Vi.), the court determined the fire safety provisions did not withstand Eighth Amendment scrutiny because the cell locking devices, manual alarm systems, smoke dampers, and heat detectors were all inoperable, which together pose[d] a security risk during a fire emergency. While some of the same conditions might be said to exist in Oregon County jail, such as the lack of an operable sprinkler system, these cases are distinguishable because they tend to represent the outer bounds of decency. In Hadix v. Johnson, 367 F.3d 513 (6th Cir.2004), the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals conducted a review of Women Prisoners, Carty, and a number of other cases to determine which cases found constitutional violations and which cases did not. Hadix relied on Helling v. McKinney, 509 U.S. 25, 36, 113 S.Ct. 2475, 125 L.Ed.2d 22 (1993), a Supreme Court case holding an analysis of whether the conditions of confinement violate the Eighth Amendment requires a court to assess whether society considers the risk that the prisoner complains of to be so grave that it violates contemporary standards of decency to expose anyone unwillingly to such a risk. In this case, the conditions at the Oregon County jail were not so dangerous as to violate contemporary standards of decency in comparison with Women Prisoners and Carty. The facilities maintained operable fire extinguishers and smoke detectors and the officers conducted sweeps for contraband and established an anti-smoking policy, as noted above. Moreover, there is no suggestion of overcrowding of inmates, lack of fire exits, inoperable cell locking devices, or any of the other conditions present in Women Prisoners and Carty. Under these circumstances, we do not find the reasoning of these cases to be analogous and we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment on Davis's section 1983 and constitutional claims.