Opinion ID: 4541298
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Officer Melton

Text: Officer Melton pulled Silvis off the bridge, interacted with Silvis several times after he was placed in jail, and heard Silvis banging on his cell and yelling that his wrist hurt, that he should have jumped, and that he wanted a nurse. Based on these facts, a jury could reasonably find that Officer Melton 6 In Jacobs, there was a third officer who we found was entitled to qualified immunity. Though that officer failed to perform regular checks on the detainee, he had only been on the job for six months and had been following the direct orders of a superior officer—who had twenty years’ experience and was more familiar with the suicide risks—when he placed the detainee in that particular cell and allowed her to have a blanket and towel. Accordingly, we determined that “[i]n light of his more limited knowledge, and the fact that the orders he received from his two superiors were not facially outrageous, [the officer] acted reasonably in following them” and was entitled to qualified immunity. Jacobs, 228 F.3d at 398. Here, there is no suggestion that any of the Defendants lacked the experience or training to have fully appreciated the risks posed by loose bedding when given to a suicidal inmate. Moreover, there is no suggestion that any of the Defendants lacked the autonomy to remove the loose bedding from the cell or otherwise take actions to protect Silvis from the risk of harm. 10 Case: 17-41234 Document: 00515450818 Page: 11 Date Filed: 06/12/2020 No. 17-41234 also had subjective knowledge that Silvis was at risk of committing suicide. See Hyatt, 843 F.3d at 178. In addition to having all of the training and knowledge that Dispatcher Whelan had concerning inmates committing suicide with loose bedding and witnessing Silvis in his cell with the blanket he should not have had, Officer Melton also failed to intervene in Silvis’s suicide because he was streaming television shows instead of monitoring the video of Silvis’s cell. Again, Jacobs informs of the clearly established law concerning objectively reasonable, or unreasonable (as the case may be), behavior. In Jacobs, we took special notice of the fact that officers allowed more than forty-five minutes to pass between checking on the inmate they knew to be suicidal, allowing her enough time to use her loose bedding to commit suicide. Jacobs, 228 F.3d at 391 (“What is clear is that as many as 45 minutes elapsed from the time a deputy last checked on Jacobs to the time she was discovered hanging from the light fixture in the detox cell.”). Here, accepting the Plaintiffs’ facts as true, Officer Melton knew that Silvis was at a substantial risk of committing suicide, observed that Silvis had been issued a blanket he wasn’t supposed to have, failed to remove that blanket, and failed to monitor Silvis as he was supposed to. Officer Melton was not even expected to physically approach Silvis’s cell; he was just asked to move his eyes from one television screen to another. Yet forty-five minutes passed between Silvis’s death and officers discovering his body. Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that, by failing to take simple and reasonable precautions, Officer Melton displayed deliberate indifference to the risk of harm to Silvis.