Opinion ID: 4375914
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The August 2015 Incident

Text: As noted by the magistrate judge in the R&R, the parties swore to diametrically opposed versions of events surrounding the August 2015 incident. Sears alleged that Thomas slammed him into a wall after Thomas escorted him to the office, but Thomas claimed that they never went to the office. Similarly, Sears 11 Case: 18-13423 Date Filed: 03/11/2019 Page: 12 of 19 claimed to have been punched in the face and assaulted for 13 minutes by Thomas, Villalpando, and several other officers; Thomas and Villalpando stated that no such abuse occurred. Those warring affidavits speak directly to the issue of the use of excessive force and the subsequent medical treatment that Sears would have needed to treat the injuries sustained as a result of that excessive force. Therefore, assuming that Sears’s allegations were true, there was a genuine dispute as to the material facts when only the affidavits are considered; a reasonable fact-finder could have found that the prison officials used excessive force if the fact-finder found Sears to be more credible than the prison officials. Kernel Records Oy, 694 F.3d at 1300. Recognizing this, the district court relied on the medical records from the day of the incident and Nurse Sapp’s sworn statement that Sears had no visible injuries of any kind to conclude that Sears’s story was implausible. The court noted Nurse Sapp found no injuries consistent with Sears’s claim that he was assaulted by several officers over a period of 13 minutes. Further, the court stated Sears himself conceded he had no visible injuries after Thomas allegedly slammed him into a wall. Finally, the court noted the record did not contain any evidence that Sears had requested medical care for the injuries he allegedly received. If the medical records were unchallenged, the court would have been correct that they rendered his allegations implausible. Scott, 550 U.S. at 380; Cuesta, 285 12 Case: 18-13423 Date Filed: 03/11/2019 Page: 13 of 19 F.3d at 970. However, the medical evidence (or lack thereof) that the court relied on here was not uncontroverted, as demonstrated by Sears’s objections to the R&R. Thus, it was error for the court to conclude that Sears’s claims were implausible in light of those records. Scott, 550 U.S. at 380. Sears testified that Thomas did not allow Nurse Sapp to document his injuries, which calls into question the contents of Nurse Sapp’s report. Further, the district court’s reliance on the absence of requests for medical care by Sears was misplaced because one would not expect to find medical records from a period of time in which a person swears that they were systematically denied medical treatment. Although Nurse Sapp is not a party to this litigation, she was employed at the same facility as the named defendants at the time she made the report on which the district court relied. To the extent a medical report can be considered “objective,” her report was not akin to one from a neutral medical provider because she had an employment relationship with the facility whose officials were being sued. Thus, given that relationship, it is questionable whether the district court could rely on Nurse Sapp’s report as objective evidence that contradicted Sears’s sworn statements. Reeves, 530 U.S. at 150. Finally, the medical records here are not the same as the “incontrovertible” video evidence that courts must accept over contradictory sworn statements, since those records involve people and all their attendant mental infirmities, biases, and 13 Case: 18-13423 Date Filed: 03/11/2019 Page: 14 of 19 limitations-in their creation. See Scott, 550 U.S. at 380. Construing the facts and all reasonable inferences in a light most favorable to Sears, a reasonable fact-finder could find that Thomas and Villalpando used excessive force against Sears and then concealed Sears’s resulting injuries by ordering Nurse Sapp not to record those injuries in her report. Accordingly, it was error for the court to grant summary judgment in favor of the prison officials on Sears’s excessive force claims because the self-serving nature of Sears’s sworn statements do not preclude those statements from creating a genuine dispute of material fact, and there is no uncontroverted objective evidence rendering his account implausible. Kingsland, 382 F.3d at 1226; Stein, 881 F.3d at 858-59; Campbell, 169 F.3d at 1375.