Opinion ID: 166819
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Marion Joe Russell, Raymond Ducharme, and Jeff Poteet

Text: 19 At the time of plaintiff's incarceration, defendant Russell was the Sheriff of Love County, and Poteet and Ducharme were Marietta police officers. The parties do not dispute that on December 23, 2002, Russell, Poteet and Ducharme entered plaintiff's cell, restrained him, handcuffed him to a backboard, and sprayed him with pepper spray. However, all of the other facts relating to this backboard incident are in dispute. 20 Defendants contend that the incident began with an argument between plaintiff and defendant Knowles, a sheriff's deputy, over how many vitamins plaintiff would receive that day. According to Sheriff Russell, plaintiff's uncontroverted deposition testimony establishes that he became upset with Knowles and started kicking his cell door, which prompted other inmates to kick their cell doors. Knowles ordered plaintiff to stop kicking, but plaintiff kicked the cell door at least one more time. Knowles responded by calling Sheriff Russell to the jail, who brought in officers Poteet and Ducharme. Russell, Poteet, and Ducharme entered plaintiff's cell with a backboard, a device used to restrain inmates, and ordered plaintiff to get on the backboard. Plaintiff refused and then resisted as the officers physically put him on the backboard. 4 Russell concedes that during the incident, plaintiff was sprayed with pepper spray, probably by Officer Ducharme. Plaintiff ceased resisting the officers after he was sprayed. Russell contends that the use of pepper spray was warranted under the circumstances because it was necessary to maintain order and restore discipline. This is apparent, he argues, from the fact that after plaintiff was sprayed, he stopped resisting the officers' efforts to restrain him. 21 Poteet and Ducharme claim that plaintiff's kicking the cell door incited the other inmates to begin kicking, yelling, and screaming, and that the situation became riotous. They contend that when plaintiff was ordered to lie down on the backboard, he became combative and that the use of force and pepper spray was necessary to regain control of the situation. 22 Plaintiff denies that he was combative. He maintains that the situation was never riotous and that the force used and the pepper spray were unnecessary to restrain him. In support, plaintiff points to Poteet's deposition testimony that at the time of the incident plaintiff was in his sixties, whereas Poteet was only twenty-two years old and Ducharme was thirty-two or thirty-three. Plaintiff also provided an affidavit from fellow inmate Lynwood Moore, who averred that he personally witnessed the backboard incident. 5 According to Moore, although plaintiff and some other inmates did kick their cell doors that night, the situation in the jail never became riotous. He averred that plaintiff sat down on the backboard when ordered to do so, but told the officers that he did not want to lay down. He stated that Sheriff Russell sat on plaintiff's lower body while the other officers held his arms. Plaintiff resisted out of instinct, but did not become combative. 23 With respect to the pepper spray, Moore averred that one of the police officers was holding the can about two inches from [plaintiff's] eyes and was waving the can around like he was spray-painting [plaintiff's] face. He sprayed . . . 5-7 seconds. Aplt.App. at 203. Moore stated that after they sprayed plaintiff, they handcuffed his arms and legs to the board and then one of the officers held plaintiff's head back and tossed some water in his eyes. Finally, Moore stated that after the officers removed plaintiff from the cell, he could hear plaintiff crying and begging for hours to be let up, telling the officers that he was in pain, but that the officers kept telling plaintiff to shut up. This evidence is consistent with plaintiff's deposition testimony that the pepper spray soaked [him] pretty good, Love County Suppl. App. at 123. Plaintiff testified: It was running plumb down between my legs, even on the first spray — and down my lungs, my nostrils, my eyes. I was soaked. Id. [P]epper spray is an instrument with which prison officers wield their authority, or force, and thus its use implicates the excessive use of force. DeSpain v. Uphoff, 264 F.3d 965, 978 (10th Cir.2001). To succeed on his excessive use of force claim, plaintiff must show (1) that the alleged wrongdoing was objectively harmful enough to establish a constitutional violation; and (2) that defendants acted with a sufficiently culpable state of mind. Smith v. Cochran, 339 F.3d 1205, 1212 (10th Cir.2003). The objective component . . . is contextual and responsive to contemporary standards of decency. The subjective element . . . turns on whether force was applied in a good faith effort to maintain or restore discipline or maliciously and sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm. Id. (citation and quotation marks omitted). 24 In this case, the facts relevant to both the objective and subjective elements of the excessive force test are hotly contested. Whether defendants' use of the spray was objectively harmful enough to violate plaintiff's Eighth Amendment rights turns in part on how long plaintiff was sprayed and whether he was adequately irrigated afterwards or left to suffer unnecessarily. The parties dispute these issues. They also disagree as to whether defendants sprayed plaintiff in a good faith effort to restore discipline or maliciously and sadistically for the purpose of causing harm. 25 The district court concluded that the fact that the Plaintiff may have been injured was not the intent of the Defendants. The intent was to restrain the Plaintiff until he was willing to comply with jailhouse rules. Aplt.App. at 22, see also id. at 25. The court also found that it was plaintiff who created the necessity for the use of force. Id. at 22. Given the dearth of evidence in the record, the district court could not have reached these conclusions unless it chose to believe defendants over plaintiff. However, a judge may not evaluate the credibility of witnesses in deciding a motion for summary judgment. Seamons, 206 F.3d at 1026. In cases which involve delving into the state of mind of a party, the granting of summary judgment is especially questionable. 6 Id. at 1028 (quotation marks and brackets omitted). 26 Because we conclude that genuine issues of material fact exist surrounding defendants' use of pepper spray, we reverse the district court's grant of summary judgment with respect to plaintiff's Eighth Amendment claim against defendants Russell, Poteet, and Ducharme. We also vacate the district court's merits dismissal of plaintiff's state law claim for assault and battery against these defendants and remand for further proceedings consistent with this decision. 7 27 Plaintiff contends that the district court failed to address his Fourteenth Amendment claim. This is incorrect. Rather, the district court simply dismissed the claim, citing Thompson v. Gibson, 289 F.3d 1218, 1222 (10th Cir.2002). In Thompson, we reiterated the general rule that a prisoner asserting an equal protection claim must show how he was treated differently based on a suspect classification and not based on a legitimate penological purpose. Id. Even assuming all of plaintiff's allegations are true, he has not alleged that any of the defendants treated him differently based on his membership in a suspect class. Accordingly, to the extent that plaintiff's claims against any of the defendants are brought under the Fourteenth Amendment, we affirm the district court's dismissal of those claims.