Opinion ID: 204108
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Status of the Law

Text: Clearly established law does not depend on identical circumstances repeating themselves. Instead, notable factual differences may exist between prior cases and the circumstances at hand as long as the state of the law at the time gave the defendant fair warning that his action or inaction was unconstitutional. Id.; accord Safford Unified Sch. Dist. No. 1 v. Redding, ___ U.S. ___, 129 S. Ct. 2633, 2643 (2009). In an area of the law that is -8- continuing to evolve, there will be a range extending from an established core to outer boundaries where there is not clearly established law. See DeMayo v. Nugent, 517 F.3d 11, 18 (1st Cir. 2008). The law is considered clearly established either if courts have previously ruled that materially similar conduct was unconstitutional, or if a general constitutional rule already identified in the decisional law applies with obvious clarity to the specific conduct at issue. Guillemard-Ginorio v. ContrerasGomez, 585 F.3d 508, 527 (1st Cir. 2009) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Supreme Court has established a general constitutional standard that [a] prison official’s 'deliberate indifference' to a substantial risk of serious harm to an inmate violates the Eighth Amendment.3 Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 828 (1994); accord Calderón-Ortiz v. LaBoy-Alvarado, 300 F.3d 60, 63-64 (1st Cir. 2002) (An inmate may sue a correctional facility under the Eighth Amendment for failure to afford adequate protection to inmates from attack by other inmates.). Prison officials have a constitutional duty not to be deliberately indifferent to the risk to prisoners of violence at the hands of other prisoners. Burrell v. Hampshire County, 307 F.3d 1, 7 (1st 3 Pretrial detainees are protected under the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause rather than the Eighth Amendment; however, the standard to be applied is the same as that used in Eighth Amendment cases. Burrell, 307 F.3d at 7. -9- Cir. 2002). Therefore, in August of 2004, when the events giving rise to this case occurred, the law was clearly established that a detainee had a constitutional right not to be punished until convicted of the charges against him and that a corrections official would violate the Fourteenth Amendment if he were deliberately indifferent to a substantial risk of serious harm to a detainee, including violence inflicted by one detainee upon another detainee. In 2004, deliberate indifference, in the constitutional context, meant that a prison official subjectively 'must both be aware of facts from which the inference could be drawn that a substantial risk of serious harm exists, and he must also draw the inference.' Id. at 8 (quoting Farmer, 511 U.S. at 837). That standard, which has remained in effect up to the present time, requires something less than acts or omissions for the very purpose of causing harm or with knowledge that harm will result but something more than mere negligence. Farmer, 511 U.S. at 835. After the standard was announced in Farmer and before August of 2004, we addressed the level of culpability required to meet the deliberate indifference standard in the context of prisoners inflicting violence on other prisoners. We considered First Circuit precedent addressing deliberate indifference to inmate violence in Burrell. 307 F.3d at 9. There, we noted that we vacated summary judgment in the -10- defendants’ favor in Giroux v. Somerset County, 178 F.3d 28 (1st Cir. 1999), where jail officials inexplicably introduced a person posing a known danger, another inmate who had repeatedly threatened Giroux, into the holding cell where Giroux was being kept. Burrell, 307 F.3d at 9. The jail officials took that action although they appeared to know that their own actions would tar Giroux as an informant and thereby increase the risk to him. Id. In Calderón-Ortiz, we concluded that the plaintiff sufficiently alleged deliberate indifference to avoid dismissal where inmates were not classified, leaving more dangerous inmates with vulnerable inmates and where prison officials failed to make their regular patrols of the housing areas, allowing a violent attack to go on for between half an hour and an hour. Burrell, 307 F.3d at 9. In contrast, we concluded that the record in Burrell did not sufficiently show deliberate indifference to avoid summary judgment because the officials responded reasonably to the risk that was known to them at the time. Id. at 8. There, Burrell and his wife complained to prison officials about problems with an inmate who later attacked Burrell. We concluded that the officials were not indifferent and instead acted reasonably in not providing additional protection for Burrell because they knew he was highly trained in self defense and martial arts, neither Burrell nor his wife requested protective custody, no history existed of violence -11- between Burrell and the inmate who attacked him, and the officials believed Burrell could and would protect himself. With the standard in mind, we next consider whether a reasonable official in Nelson’s position would have been on notice, given the state of the law in 2004, that his conduct violated the Fourteenth Amendment.