Opinion ID: 2718872
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Granting Summary Judgment to the Defendants

Text: “We review a district court’s grant of summary judgment de novo, applying the same legal standards that controlled the district court’s decision.” Levinson v. Reliance Standard Life Ins. Co., 245 F.3d 1321, 1325 (11th Cir. 2001). Ordinarily, this entails viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party, 3 Case: 14-10605 Date Filed: 08/19/2014 Page: 4 of 7 but “[w]hen opposing parties tell two different stories, one of which is blatantly contradicted by the record, so that no reasonable jury could believe it, a court should not adopt that version of the facts for purposes of ruling on a motion for summary judgment.” Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372, 380 (11th Cir. 2007). More specifically, when uncontroverted video evidence is available, the court should view the facts in the light depicted by the video recording. Id. at 380-81. In the instant case, Mathis and the defendants told contradictory stories about what happened after the defendants took Mathis and another inmate into the shower area for their evening showers. According to Mathis, after the defendants put the other inmate in the far shower stall, the defendants improperly removed his handcuffs before securing his shower gate and then assaulted him in his stall by punching and kicking him, stabbing him with the shower keys, and spraying him with mace. Mathis claimed this assault lasted approximately thirty minutes before the defendants called for backup. The defendants, meanwhile, claim that after they brought Mathis to his stall, he managed to slip his handcuff and punched Adams in the face, requiring Adams and Carey to use physical force, including using mace, to restrain him. The defendants further claimed that they had only entered the shower area for approximately one minute before the assault took place and Adams radioed for backup. 4 Case: 14-10605 Date Filed: 08/19/2014 Page: 5 of 7 The video evidence showed that Adams and Carey brought Mathis to the shower area at approximately 5:50 p.m. and that approximately one minute after entering the shower Adams radioed for backup. The video evidence further established that a total of approximately five minutes elapsed from the time Adams and Carey first took Mathis into the shower area to the time Mathis was taken away to receive medical attention. The video evidence did not, however, depict what happened in the shower stall. In light of the uncontroverted video evidence, the district court was required to view the facts in the light depicted by the video even if Mathis’s allegations contradicted its depiction. Id. As a result, the district court could not credit Mathis’s allegation that the defendants beat him for thirty minutes, as that allegation was “blatantly contradicted by the record, so that no reasonably jury could believe it.” Id. at 380. However, the district court erred insofar as it credited the defendants’ version of the facts over Mathis’s on issues not depicted by video evidence. For example, the video evidence could not directly establish whether Mathis or Adams struck first. While the video evidence may have made it less likely that Adams struck first in that it may not have been very sensible to assault a prisoner and then immediately call for backup, it did not “so utterly discredit” that allegation “that no reasonable jury could have believed [it].” Id. And if Adams struck Mathis first prior to any provocation, such an assault could support a finding 5 Case: 14-10605 Date Filed: 08/19/2014 Page: 6 of 7 that Adams applied force “maliciously and sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm” in connection with an excessive-force claim under § 1983. See Thomas v. Bryant, 614 F.3d 1288, 1304 (11th Cir. 2010) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Griffin v. City of Opa-Locka, 261 F.3d 1295, 1303 (11th Cir. 2001) (“[T]o prevail on a civil rights action under § 1983, a plaintiff must show that he or she was deprived of a federal right by a person acting under color of state law.”). The district court also erred by interpreting our decision in O’Bryant v. Finch, 637 F.3d 1207 (11th Cir. 2011), to mean that Mathis, in asserting his excessive-force claim, could not dispute the factual findings made in internal prison disciplinary hearings. In O’Bryant, we held that “[i]f a prisoner is found guilty of an actual disciplinary infraction after being afforded due process and there was evidence to support the disciplinary panel’s fact finding, the prisoner cannot later state a retaliation claim against the prison employee who reported the infraction in a disciplinary report.” Id. at 1215-16. We did not hold in O’Bryant that internal prison proceedings could usurp judicial fact finding outside the context of a retaliation claim. The district court erred insofar as it interpreted O’Bryant to limit its ability to review the factual allegations underlying Mathis’s excessive-force claim under the traditional standard applicable to a motion for summary judgment. 6 Case: 14-10605 Date Filed: 08/19/2014 Page: 7 of 7 For these reasons, at least one disputed issue of material fact existed, and the district court erred in granting summary judgment to the defendants. Similarly, the district court erred in concluding the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity 1 because in making this determination it failed to resolve a disputed question of material fact—i.e., whether Adams or Mathis struck first—in Mathis’s favor. See Bryant v. Jones, 575 F.3d 1281, 1295 (11th Cir. 2009).