Opinion ID: 2975244
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Barry McLemore

Text: Williams’s Eighth Amendment claim is strongest with respect to defendant Barry McLemore. At the time of Williams’s allegations, McLemore served as the Warden at SMI. Williams has set forth allegations that suggest McLemore had subjective knowledge of the alleged danger that Williams faced at JMF. In his third step grievance response, Director McGinnis noted that Williams was in administrative segregation due to his request for protection and stated that McGinnis would be forwarding his grievance response to McLemore. Moreover, McLemore served as the second respondent to Williams’s second grievance appeal. In his grievance appeal, which McLemore reviewed, Williams explained that he had enemies at JMF and that he feared for his life. A 5 According to Williams’s amended complaint, Bailey “reviewed the first step grievance response, and he found it proper and in compliance with policy and [Williams’s] rights.” - 18 - No. 05-2678 Williams v. McLemore et al. reasonable factfinder could therefore conclude that McLemore had knowledge of the risk that Williams faced at JMF. See Ewolski v. City of Brunswick, 287 F.3d 492, 513 n.7 (6th Cir. 2002) (noting that “an official’s subjective awareness of a risk may be proved circumstantially by evidence suggesting that the defendant . . . had been exposed to information concerning the risk and thus must have known about it.”) (internal citation and quotation marks omitted); see also Farmer, 511 U.S. at 843 n.8 (noting that a prison official “would not escape liability if the evidence showed that he merely refused to verify underlying facts that he strongly suspected to be true, or declined to confirm inferences of risk that he strongly suspected to exist”). In contrast to defendants Warr, White, and Bailey, Williams has also alleged facts sufficient to support a finding that McLemore acted unreasonably in returning Williams to JMF without conducting an SCC meeting. In his response to Williams’s first grievance, Director McGinnis found that there were several errors with the denial of Williams’s SCC hearing, concluding that “it appears based on the step one response, the grievant has a physical impairment which calls for special cuffs to be used for handcuffing.” Although Director McGinnis did not explicitly direct McLemore to conduct an SCC meeting with Williams, McGinnis forwarded the grievance to McLemore “to ensure that appropriate action is taken on this issue.” This language, and McLemore’s title, suggests that McLemore had the authority to conduct an SCC meeting in order to investigate and substantiate Williams’s claims of danger at JMF.6 6 Because Director McGinnis forwarded his grievance response to McLemore with the implied instruction to conduct an SCC meeting, and McLemore failed to do so, this case is distinguished from our prior cases that have held that a prison official’s denial of an administrative grievance cannot be the basis of liability. See Shehee v. Luttrell, 199 F.3d 295, 300 (6th Cir. 1999) (noting that plaintiff’s only allegations against defendants was their “denial of his administrative - 19 - No. 05-2678 Williams v. McLemore et al. Nevertheless, despite Director McGinnis’s grievance response and Williams’s repeated claims of danger, Williams was sent back to JMF without a meeting. Given Williams’s repeated expressed concerns for his safety and his continued willingness to subject himself to discipline in order to avoid a return to JMF, we conclude that a reasonable trier of fact could find that McLemore unreasonably disregarded the risk to Williams’s safety by failing to conduct an SCC meeting and attempting to substantiate Williams’s allegations of danger. In order to avoid qualified immunity for McLemore, in addition to showing that McLemore violated Williams’s constitutional right, Williams must also show that the right McLemore allegedly violated was clearly established. We conclude that it was. The Court made clear in Farmer that prison officials have a duty “to protect prisoners from violence at the hands of other prisoners,” Farmer, 511 U.S. at 833, and that an official may be held liable if he knows of and disregards an excessive risk to an inmate’s health or safety, id. at 837. Thus, in August of 1998, four years after Farmer was issued, McLemore would have had reason to know that he acted unlawfully in disregarding the risk to Williams’s safety; qualified immunity is thus not available to McLemore. Finally, defendants also argue that they are entitled to summary judgment because Williams has not shown that he was attacked by either of the two enemies that Williams identified in his February 1998 note. We disagree. In Farmer, the Court stated that a defendant prison official may not: escape liability for deliberate indifference by showing that, while he was aware of an obvious, substantial risk to inmate safety, he did not know that the complainant was especially likely to be assaulted by the specific prisoner who eventually committed grievances”). - 20 - No. 05-2678 Williams v. McLemore et al. the assault. The question under the Eighth Amendment is whether prison officials, acting with deliberate indifference, exposed a prisoner to a sufficiently substantial “risk of serious damage to his future health,” Helling [v. McKinley], 509 U.S. [25] at 35 [(1993)], and it does not matter whether the risk comes from a single source or multiple sources, any more than it matters whether a prisoner faces an excessive risk of attack for reasons personal to him or because all prisoners in his situation face such a risk. Farmer, 511 U.S. at 843. Following Farmer, we have upheld prisoner Eighth Amendment claims based on allegations that prison officials disregarded a risk of future assault to the inmate based on the inmate’s characteristics. See, e.g., Greene, 361 F.3d at 295; Taylor v. Mich. Dep’t of Corr., 69 F.3d 76, 84 (6th Cir. 1995). In these cases, it was not fatal to the inmate-plaintiff’s claim that they were unable to identify their actual assailant before the prison official’s disregard of their safety; nothing in Farmer suggests that Williams’s claim must fail because he cannot identify the person who stabbed him.