Opinion ID: 625727
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: deliberate indifference of jail officials

Text: The Estate asserts that two groups of jail personnel are liable for Rice's death. These include four of the guards who were on duty the night that Rice died (officers Shelton, Scott Eisenhour, Kimberly Baxter, and Samantha Werth) as well as Books, Rogers, and Call, this time in their individual capacities. The Estate's theory is that the entire staff of the jail, from supervisors to guards, was aware that Rice was severely mentally ill. Even if jail personnel were unaware of the possibility that he might die from water toxicity brought on by compulsive water drinking, the Estate reasons, there were fifteen months of warning signs prior to his death that Rice could not care for himself and suffered from self-destructive tendencies, and a jury could find that staff members were subjectively aware of the substantial risk that Rice might harm himself fatally in some way. That knowledge, the Estate argues, compelled the jail defendants to keep Rice under close watch in order to prevent him from hurting himself. Certainly once Rice had cut his throat with the razor in August 2004, he should have been treated as a suicide risk, the Estate reasons: Had Defendants followed their own suicide prevention policies, the likelihood of Nicholas's death would have been greatly diminished or prevented. Estate Br. 45. Instead, they ignored the risk, and thus increased the odds that Rice might injure himself to the point of death before anyone could intervene. And the guards on duty the night Rice died allegedly did not comply with the jail's standing rule that inmates housed in the administrative segregation unit be checked upon hourly and did not respond to the door-kicking of inmates who heard Rice's distress. The district court rejected the deliberate indifference claims against these defendants on the ground that jail staff, even if they did appreciate the gravity of Rice's mental illness, had no warning that Rice might experience the psychogenic polydipsia that caused his death. With respect to the guards, the court assumed, consistent with inmate Shaw's affidavit, that they had not made hourly checks of the administrative segregation unit on the night Rice died. 2009 WL 1748059, at , . Still, the court believed that the guards could not be characterized as deliberately indifferent to Rice's plight because there was no evidence that those guards in particular knew of his serious medical condition and, even if they did, they could not have foreseen his death from water intoxication. Id., at . And assuming that other inmates in the unit with Rice had indeed kicked their doors when they heard Rice in distress, the evidence did not suggest that their entreaties included any warning that Rice was in extremis and needed medical attention. Id. In short, the guards were not alerted to the need to regularly monitor Rice to prevent an occurrence of the kind that resulted in his death. Id. As for Books, Rogers, and Call, the court agreed that they were aware of Rice's medical condition. Id., at . But they were entitled to rely on the expertise of medical personnel as to the appropriate care of Rice, and they granted Rice access to medical treatment, did not interfere with said treatment, and did not withhold relevant information from the medical professionals. Id. There was no evidence that jail managers should have questioned the judgment of those professionals, especially where medical personnel had access to medical records that jail officials themselves were forbidden under federal law from seeing. Id. Although we do not concur with the district court's reasoning in all respects, we nonetheless conclude that the district court correctly granted summary judgment to these defendants. A factfinder might conclude that the guards exhibited a generalized recklessness with respect to the safety of the inmates housed on Ward One by failing to conduct hourly checks of the administrative segregation unit. But there is no evidence that the guards were subjectively aware of the possibility that Rice might engage in a behavior such as compulsive water drinking that would cause him to die within a matter of hours and that they consciously disregarded that risk. Nor is there evidence that the jail's supervisors were aware of such a possibility. On this record, a factfinder could not reasonably conclude that any of the jail personnel were deliberately indifferent to this sort of risk. A reading of the record favorable to the Estate certainly would support a finding that the guards failed to conduct hourly checks of the administrative segregation unit on the night of Rice's death. Inmate Shaw, who was housed in the cell next to Rice's, averred in his affidavit that over the course of multiple hours during which Rice could be heard vomiting, no guard came to check on inmates in the unit, even after Shaw and other inmates began mule-kicking their doors in an unsuccessful effort to gain the guards' attention. Although the named guards and the jail insist that hourly checks on the unit were made, and that nothing out of the ordinary was apparent, Shaw's affidavit is enough to create a factual dispute on this point, as the guards' counsel rightly concedes. Payne v. Pauley, 337 F.3d 767, 772-73 (7th Cir.2003). If no checks were made, a factfinder certainly could conclude that the guards who were required to make those checks were indifferent to the concerns underlying the rule mandating those checks. Surprisingly, not only do the briefs fail to discuss the purpose and nature of the jail's administrative segregation unit and the types of inmates who are placed in that unit, they also omit any discussion of the reasons for the hourly check rule. Administrative segregation is often used to isolate from the general population of the prison inmates who either pose a danger to other inmates or who may be especially vulnerable to assaults by other inmates. But we do not know whether the administrative segregation unit in Elkhart's county jail was regularly used (and was known by the guards to be used) as a place to house prisoners who required frequent observation because they were medically fragile or likely to harm themselves. Proof along those lines might support a finding that the guards appreciated the risk they were taking by not conscientiously making their rounds. Cf. Arnett v. Webster, supra, 658 F.3d at 755 (Non-medical defendants simply cannot ignore an inmate's plight.); Sanville v. McCaughtry, supra, 266 F.3d at 739 (If the [guards] were aware of the alleged risk [of suicide], failing to determine what was going on in [the inmate's] cell could easily be conduct egregious to rise to the level of deliberate indifference.). But no such evidence is cited to us. Rice's mental illness appears to have been common knowledge at the jail, and so we may assume for the sake of argument that each of the guards on duty knew of his illness. Yet there is no evidence that any of them, even if they were aware of his full history at the jail (including his weight loss, inability to care for himself, and frequent catatonia) knew that he might engage in behavior like compulsive water drinking that could quickly result in his death absent intervention by the jail staff. The Estate's reliance on the razor incident as sufficient to place jail staff on notice of the risk to Rice is understandable, as that is the only prior incident that might fall into the category of self-destructive behavior necessitating immediate intervention. But the incident was investigated by nurse Hess and deemed not to be a suicide attempt. As we have noted, her view was shared by the physician at Goshen Hospital who treated Rice for his wound. And, again, Rice ultimately did not commit suicide. Rather than deliberately harming himself, he suffered a compulsion to drink excessive water which resulted in a drop in his blood sodium levels and a heart attack. Categorizing both incidents as manifestations of Rice's self-destructive tendencies, and insisting that the incident with the razor blade was enough to make the jail staff aware that Rice might harm himself involuntarily and inadvertently, ignores the substantial differences between the two incidents and the lack of any warning whatsoever that Rice might die as a result of a phenomenon like psychogenic polydipsia. So even if the guards recklessly failed to conduct hourly checks as they were required to do, no reasonable factfinder could find that they knew of, and were deliberately indifferent to, a risk that Rice might come to medical harm like cardiac arrhythmia brought on by water toxicity were he not checked on regularly. See State Bank of St. Charles v. Camic, 712 F.2d 1140, 1146 (7th Cir. 1983) (even if defendant police officers disregarded established procedures, such as conducting hourly checks of detainees, deliberate indifference not shown in absence of evidence that defendants were actually aware that detainee who killed himself was a suicide risk, and reasonable precautions against suicide had otherwise been taken); see also Cagle v. Sutherland, 334 F.3d 980, 987-88 (11th Cir.2003) (per curiam) (failure to conduct hourly checks of detainees as required by prior consent decree insufficient by itself to establish deliberate indifference to detainee who committed suicide, absent evidence that defendants had actual knowledge of risk that a detainee was likely to commit suicide); Hott v. Hennepin County, Minn., 260 F.3d 901, 907-08 (8th Cir.2001) (deputy's alleged failure to conduct requisite hourly checks of special needs section of detention center insufficient to show deliberate indifference to needs of inmate who killed himself, where evidence did not show deputy's awareness of substantial risk that an inmate might commit suicide); Timson v. Juvenile & Jail Facility Mgmt. Servs., Inc., 355 Fed. Appx. 283, 286 (11th Cir.2009) (per curiam) (non-precedential decision) (deliberate indifference not shown despite failure of guards to check jail inmates every thirty minutes as required by their corporate employer's policy, where evidence did not show guards had reason to be suspicious that inmate had suicidal tendencies). Accepting the Estate's version of the facts as true, the possibility that the guards did not respond to the kicking and shouting of other inmates is particularly disturbing. We do not agree that simply because the inmates did not somehow expressly signal that there was a medical emergency, the guards were not placed on notice that an inmate was in medical distress. Presumably that information would have been conveyed had any guard heard the commotion and responded; and medical distress would be one possibility that the inmates' urgent kicking would convey. The whole point of the door-kicking, one may infer, was to alert the guards that something was amiss and convince them to come into the unit so that they could be told just what that was. Either none of the named guards heard the kicking and shouting, or one or more of them did hear it and simply did not bother to investigate. Nonetheless there are at least two problems with this claim that foreclose relief to the Estate. First, there is no discussion in the Estate's brief as to which of the four named guards, if any, would have been in a position to hear the door-kicking of the inmates on Ward One. We know very little about how the jail, and the administrative segregation unit in particular, was monitored in the overnight hours; nor do we know where any of the four named guards was stationed in the jail on the night of Rice's death. Was the jail so small that vigorous door-kicking in Ward One would have been heard anywhere on the premises? Even if not, would the assigned rounds of all four of the named guards apart from conducting hourly checks of Ward One itselfhave at least brought them within hearing range of the administrative segregation unit at some point during the hours immediately prior to Rice's death, such that they would have heard the kicking? Such questions are left unaddressed by the briefs. Second, the Sheriff's counsel, at oral argument both before the district court and this court, and without contradiction by the Estate, noted that the guard (Bruno Martinsky) who was stationed in the control room just across the hall from the administrative segregation unit on the night of Rice's deathand was thus in a position to have heard any commotion on Ward Onehad been dismissed from the litigation by the Estate. See R. 349 at 50. Our discussion as to the jail supervisors (Books, Call, Rogers) may be much more brief. The Estate does not contend that any of these three defendants was responsible (in his individual capacity) for the failure to check on Rice the night he died. Its theory instead is that these defendants were all aware of Rice's severe mental illness and his increasingly pitiful condition and should have, at the least, taken steps to monitor his condition more closely, as by putting him on suicide watch, so that his compulsive water drinking on the night of his death would not have gone unnoticed. We have already disposed of the notion that the jail should have put Rice on suicide watch. It appears that Rice was put in the administrative segregation unit at least in part to monitor him more closely, and we are told that his assigned cell (5A) was the cell most easily seen from the control room across the hall. It also appears that as Rice's condition deteriorated, jail administrators made more of an effort to keep track of his weight, showering, and so forth. We may assume that jail officials, short of treating Rice as a suicide risk, could have done more to watch Rice. (We have already observed that a jury could find jail personnel liable for deliberate indifference to his conditions of confinement.) But what precludes the Estate from recovering against these officials for Rice's death is the lack of any evidence that they were on notice of the type of risk that materialized when Rice unexpectedly began to consume excessive amounts of water. Jail officials had no forewarning of that type of event, or of the risk that he might die suddenly when it occurred.