Opinion ID: 811159
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Personal Involvement Jury Instruction

Text: At the request of the defendants, the district court gave the following instruction, adapted from Seventh Circuit Pattern Civil Jury Instruction No. 7.02, to the jury: In order to hold Defendant Officers Rick Caballero or Matthew Peterson individually liable, Plaintiff must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that each was personally involved in the conduct Plaintiff complains about. You may not hold Defendants Caballero or Peterson liable for what other employees did or did not do. R. 155 at 33; R. 170 at 75-76. Sanchez objected to this instruction. He maintained that the instruction was misleading, to the extent that it could be understood to suggest that neither Caballero nor Peterson could be held liable for excessive force perpetrated by another officer unless he participated in the use of that force. The district court at first was sympathetic to this argument, and it invited Sanchez’s counsel to submit language that would harmonize the personal involvement instruction with the instruction as to Sanchez’s failure-to-intervene theory of liability. R. 169-1 at 103. But once defense counsel represented to the court that one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, who evidently was no longer involved in the case, previously had agreed to the wording of the instruction, the court approved the defense version of the instruction over the plaintiff’s objection. Id. at 104. When the court addressed the jury instructions for the final time on the last day of trial, Sanchez’s counsel reminded the court that it had No. 10-3801 17 invited the parties to confer overnight regarding any outstanding disputes, and counsel indicated he was proposing an additional sentence for the personal involvement instruction that would inform the jury “that the failure to intervene can[ ] constitute a form of personal involvement.” R. 170 at 5. The court reiterated that it had already overruled Sanchez’s objection to this instruction, and once it confirmed that defense counsel had not agreed to the additional language that Sanchez proposed, the court rejected the proposed modification. Id. A threshold argument that Sanchez makes on appeal is that it was inappropriate to give the personal involvement instruction in a case that does not involve supervisory liability, but this is a nonstarter. It is true that the personal involvement pattern instruction was drafted with supervisory liability cases in mind; the two cases cited in the committee comments to the pattern instruction, Walker v. Rowe, 791 F.2d 507, 508 (7th Cir. 1986), and Duckworth v. Franzen, 780 F.2d 645, 650 (7th Cir. 1985), both address supervisory liability. But supervisory liability is merely one form of liability which is premised on a defendant’s failure to intercede in the wrongdoing of another individual and which thus presents the danger that the jury will deem the defendant vicariously liable for the actions of the other person, without regard to whether the defendant actually had notice, opportunity, and the ability to prevent the other person from inflicting harm. Liability premised on a defendant police officer’s failure to intervene in the actions of another officer presents the 18 No. 10-3801 same danger, and it is thus within a court’s discretion to give the personal involvement instruction in a failure-to-intervene case to address that danger. Indeed, the committee comments themselves envision that the personal involvement instruction may be given in such a case: that is why the comments suggest that when the jury will also be instructed on the failure to intervene pursuant to Pattern Civil Jury Instruction No. 7.16, the court consider adding language har- monizing the two instructions. See Seventh Circuit Pattern Civil Jury Instruction No. 7.02, committee comments. Which brings us to Sanchez’s primary argument. The language that Sanchez proposed adding to the personal involvement instruction, in order to harmonize it with the pattern instruction on the failure to intervene, was appropriate. A layperson is unlikely to understand that Officer A’s failure to intervene in the wrongdoing of Officer B, despite A’s knowledge of and ability to stop the wrongdoing, is a form of personal involvement in B’s misconduct. Yet, that is the upshot of such cases as Miller v. Smith, supra, 220 F.3d at 495, and it is the foundation for the failure-to-intervene theory of liability. Without language qualifying the personal involvement instruction, a jury might believe, mistakenly, that so long as Officer A does not himself use excessive force on the plaintiff, he can have no liability for Officer B’s use of excessive force. To address that potential problem, the committee comments suggest that the failure-tointervene instruction be given immediately after the personal involvement instruction and that the word No. 10-3801 19 “however” be added as a preface to the failure-to-intervene instruction. In our view, a modest one-word addition may not suffice to harmonize the two instructions, as Pattern Instruction No. 7.16 simply delineates the elements of a failure-to-intervene claim, without any introductory language signaling that a defendant’s failure to intervene in the wrongdoing of another officer qualifies as a form of personal involvement in that wrongdoing. An additional sentence explicitly advising the jury that a defendant officer’s failure to intervene in the wrongful conduct of another officer, despite a reasonable opportunity do so, can be a form of personal involvement in that wrongful conduct, would be prudent. The language that Sanchez’s counsel proposed was in line with our own suggestion, and the district court would have done well to entertain it. The fact that a prior attorney for Sanchez, who was no longer involved in the case, had agreed to the version of the personal involve- ment instruction that the court ultimately gave was irrelevant, particularly in view of the fact that the problem presented was one of reconciling that instruction with a separate instruction, and the modification that Sanchez proposed was consistent with the committee comments’ own recognition that the two instructions need additional language to render them consistent with one another. It is true, of course, that Sanchez’s attorney had the opportunity to reconcile the two instructions in his closing argument to the jury. But given the obvious tension between the personal involvement instruction and the failure-to-intervene instruction, the court itself should have explained to the jury 20 No. 10-3801 that a defendant’s failure to intervene can be a form of personal involvement in the wrongdoing of another officer. An attorney’s effort to reconcile competing concepts, however cogent, is likely to carry less weight with a jury, particularly when, as here, the court instructs the jury after rather than before the attorneys deliver their closing arguments and the court admonishes the jury to follow its instructions even if it disagrees with them. See Seventh Circuit Pattern Civil Jury Instruction No. 1.01; R. 170 at 65-66; see also R. 170 at 56 (in response to objection to argument that defense counsel made in closing, court instructed jury: “You must follow the law in the instruction[s], and to the extent that the law is misstated by either lawyer here, you should disregard that and follow the written instructions and my verbal instructions. You all understand.”). But ultimately the real problem in this case was the one posed by the language of the failure-to-intervene instruction that Sanchez’s counsel proposed and that the court gave over defense objection. As we have noted, the modified language of the failure-to-intervene instruction erroneously advised the jury that in order to hold Caballero or Peterson liable for the failure to intervene in the misconduct of another officer, one or both of the named officers themselves must have participated in that misconduct. Additionally, the instruction did not even mention the other, unnamed officers; the instruction was premised entirely on the use of force by at least one of the named defendants. Whatever potential for misunderstanding that may have been posed by the personal involvement instruction was No. 10-3801 21 thus eclipsed by the flawed language of the failure-tointervene instruction. The latter instruction as given expressly precluded the jury from holding Caballero and Peterson liable for failing to stop the false detention and/or battering of Sanchez unless one or both of the defendants were themselves perpetrators of those wrongful acts. Any modification to the wording of the personal involvement instruction thus would have done Sanchez no good whatsoever in view of the hopelessly defective language of the failure-to-intervene instruction. In short, any error in the court’s refusal to embrace the language that Sanchez posed to harmonize the personal involvement instruction with the failure-tointervene instruction was harmless. The real fault lies with the failure-to-intervene instruction itself, which was proposed by Sanchez. Having been the proponent of the flawed failure-to-intervene instruction, Sanchez is foreclosed from objecting to that instruction now.