Court Opinion

ID: 9474956
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:13:21.360378+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:25.508642
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I join in the decision of the court and in Judge Hatchett’s carefully weighed opinion with respect to all defendants except Dr. Smith. Respectfully, I would affirm with respect to them also.
The plaintiffs cannot recover under the Federal Constitution for ordinary negligence. They must show cruel and unusual punishment predicated on a showing of deliberate indifference to an inmate’s serious medical needs, Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 97 S.Ct. 285, 50 L.Ed.2d 251 (1976). The majority properly does not find the facts, but it discovers a triable issue of fact in the evidence submitted on the motions for summary judgment. Specifically, the court locates evidence that Dr. Smith deliberately distanced herself from the problem inmate Linda Rogers presented, which was within Smith’s cognizance as consulting psychiatrist for the women’s prison. It surmises that the withdrawal was a result of threats of litigation by the Rogers family, i.e., present plaintiffs, and resistance by Linda Rogers — encouraged by her family— to the medication Dr. Smith thought best. Linda was also allowed, until too late, to prevail in her intermittent resistance to being taken to the state mental hospital where her problems would have received continuous skilled attention.
One must sympathize with Dr. Smith, threatened with no doubt astronomical money damages if she meted out to Linda Rogers the treatment she thought right, and with likewise astronomical money damages if she yielded to Linda’s objections, or those made by her family on her behalf. There may, of course, be arrangements in place for the state, or an insurance company, to pay whatever is assessed, but we must assume otherwise if not told. The manifest tendency of the law as here applied would seem to be to make employment in the state’s medical service, in its institutions, attractive only to those who are judgment proof.
To avoid making the dilemma worse than it already is, I would exclude from the remand any issue as to medical treatment withheld because of objections by Linda herself, her family, or her attorneys, whether drugs or physical transfer to the mental hospital. When competing alleged constitutional rights are at issue, state medical personnel should not be required to select the right ones to respect at their peril. Nor should a doctor be required to defend in federal courts his or her refraining from the imposition of medical care rejected by the patient. That is not, I submit, an Estelle-type case.
There is apparently no evidence that Linda was viewed as suffering a mental impairment so severe she was dangerous to herself or others. Her right to object to certain treatments therefore had to be respected, as it was. This is a complication the majority opinion nowhere addresses.
Should there be any sufficient evidence that Dr. Smith deliberately withheld any other needed medical care that Linda would have accepted, and her family not have sued on, I would not object to a remand confined to that.
Finally, the plaintiffs revealed to the court their suspicion that Linda was murdered. The suspect did not move for summary judgment and the case will continue as to her. Obviously if Linda was murdered, the case against the two doctors is much diminished, if viable at all. If there *1065is to be a trial as to the doctors’ liability, it should be suspended until the murder issue is somehow disposed of.