Court Opinion

ID: 9477554
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:26:06.194756+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:56.177031
License: Public Domain

MAGILL, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I agree with the majority’s conclusion that the district court properly denied appellants’ motion for a judgment n.o.v. and a new trial. The frequency of assault at the South Dakota State Penitentiary was sufficiently high that a jury might reasonably find a pervasive risk of harm to the prisoners. Appellants’ failure to develop administrative policies to protect Vosburg and his fellow inmates in the intake facility and other high-risk areas of the penitentiary clearly justifies a jury finding that appellants failed to respond reasonably to the risk of inmate assault. Regretfully, however, I do not join the rest of the majority’s opinion because I cannot agree that the misinstruction of the jury as to damages was harmless error.
I will begin by restating enough from the record to make my objections intelligible. At the end of a lengthy closing argument, Vosburg’s counsel turned to the issue of damages and stated:
*771And then the final question you have got to decide, if you decide liability, you have got to decide the question of damages. I was appointed to represent Willard. As a part of my duty, I had a duty to put a number on what that is worth, to be raped, to have suffered that. I thought it was worth $500,000. I wouldn’t go through it for that. I wouldn’t go through it for anything. You’re going to get an Instruction. It is Instruction No. 19 that talks about the value of a constitutional right. Take a look at that Instruction. It is an important right in our system. And maybe you can’t — it’s not like I have got medical bills or anything like that to show you what can be done or how to compute it. But, it is an important right and it is a right that is entitled to be compensated.
Tr. at 975.
After counsel’s peroration, the district court, without objection, gave Instruction No. 19:
******
Damages for violations of constitutional rights are more difficult to measure than damages for physical injury or injury to one’s property. There are no substantial medical bills or other expenses by which you can judge how much compensation is appropriate. In one sense, no monetary value we place upon Constitutional rights can measure their importance in our society or compensate a citizen adequately for their deprivation. However, just because these rights are not capable of precise evaluation does not mean that an appropriate monetary amount should not be awarded, that is, in the event you find there is liability.
The precise value placed upon any Constitutional right which you find was denied to the plaintiff is within your discretion.
This instruction was fully in accordance with circuit precedent, which approved of damage awards based on the abstract value, or importance, of a constitutional right. Herrera v. Valentine, 653 F.2d 1220, 1227-31 (8th Cir.1981). While this appeal was pending, the Herrera instruction was invalidated by Memphis Community School District v. Stachura, 477 U.S. 299, 106 S.Ct. 2537, 2541 n. 5, 91 L.Ed.2d 249 (1986). As a consequence, the district court’s instruction that the jury could properly consider the abstract value of the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment is erroneous under the current state of the law.
The majority assumes1 that Stachura must be applied retroactively, ante at 767, but then goes on to determine that the jury instruction was harmless error solely on the basis of its selective forays into the record. It is with the majority’s use of the record and application of the harmless error rule that I take issue.
In Carey v. Piphus, 435 U.S. 247, 98 S.Ct. 1042, 55 L.Ed.2d 252 (1978), and more recently in Stachura, 106 S.Ct. at 2542, the Supreme Court instructed us to look first to common-law tort rules of recovery in order to compensate for injuries caused by constitutional deprivations. We have previously identified several interests protected by common-law tort rules that might be relevant to constitutional deprivations. Persons deprived of their constitutional rights are entitled to compensation for (1) physical injury, pain and suffering; (2) *772emotional distress; and (3) impairment of future earning capacity. Taken Alive v. Litzau, 551 F.2d 196, 199 (8th Cir.1977); Bauer v. Norris, 713 F.2d 408, 413 (8th Cir.1983). The latter category requires no elaboration because Vosburg made no claim for impairment of earning capacity. The sufficiency of proof as to the former two, however, merits some discussion.
A more searching view of the record reveals that Vosburg presented scant evidence as to the extent of his physical harm and emotional distress and no evidence of any physical illness resulting from that emotional distress. As Jury Instruction No. 19 indicated, “[t]here are no substantial medical bills or other expenses by which [we] can judge how much compensation is appropriate.” The testimony set out in the majority’s opinion, ante at 768-69, is carefully culled from nine volumes of trial testimony and represents the total evidence of physical and emotional harm that Vosburg attested to at trial. Vosburg also testified that he had not been examined by a medical doctor or mental health care professional, and that he was uncertain if the assaults had any effect on him because he hadn’t seen a psychiatrist. Vosburg’s expert, Dr. Sable, who testified about “rape trauma syndrome,” was a medical doctor— not a mental health care professional — and never examined Vosburg. No other expert testimony was presented by Vosburg. While there was evidence about the effect of rape generally, there was little evidence of the emotional effect on Vosburg. As the Supreme Court cautioned in Carey, 435 U.S. at 263-64, 98 S.Ct. at 1052, emotional distress in a section 1983 action must be proved by “showing the nature and circumstances of the wrong and its effect on the plaintiff.” The Court further noted: “Although essentially subjective, genuine injury in this respect must be evidenced by one’s conduct and observed by others. Juries must be guided by appropriate instructions, and an award of damages must be supported by competent evidence concerning the injury.” Id. at n. 20 (citation omitted). Vosburg simply presented no concrete evidence of his emotional distress.
I would be happy to forgive this sin of omission and join the majority’s affirmance of the damages award if the district court had not instructed the jury to assign a value to Vosburg's constitutional right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. This instruction, and the prominent part that it played in Vosburg’s presentation of proof, as indicated in the trial transcript and in his closing statement, presents the real danger that the jurors’ consideration may have wandered from the injuries Vosburg suffered into an impermissible consideration of the value of his constitutional rights, or at the very least, that the jury may have blurred the distinction between the two. Both results are prohibited under Stachura, 106 S.Ct. at 2546.
This danger is exacerbated by the nature of the constitutional right at issue. The Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment is a right esoteric to most who serve as jurors, unlike other rights more conspicuous in our system of ordered liberty. Jury Instruction No. 19 directed the jury to assign an abstract value to the right to be free from “cruel and unusual” punishment, punishment defined by the district court in Jury Instruction No. 11 as “abuse of such base, inhumane, and barbaric proportions as to shock the sensibilities.” Thus, the jury was asked to give an abstract value to a right that in itself was defined in abstract terms. These jury instructions, taken together, increased the likelihood that the jury returned an award based on abstract, as opposed to actual, damages.
The majority attempts to vault over this conundrum by comparing the damages award here to damages awarded in other sexual assault cases. In each of the cases cited by the majority, however, substantial evidence of physical and emotional harm to the victim was presented to the jury. None of those cases involved a challenge to the jury instructions or damages awarded, but instead raised issues of liability. More to the point, comparison of jury awards cannot alter the fact that the jury verdict here was a general one and thus is not amenable to the type of “harmless error” calibration *773that the majority puts to it. Stachura, 106 S.Ct. at 2546.
The essence of my complaint is that the majority focuses on the likelihood that a remand would result in a larger award for Yosburg, instead of considering, as it must, whether the verdict here may have been based on an impermissible consideration of the value of Yosburg’s constitutional rights. In so doing, the majority turns a blind eye toward the last paragraph of Stachura, which controls here:
When damages instructions are faulty and the verdict does not reveal the means by which the jury calculated damages, “[the] error in the charge is difficult, if not impossible, to correct without retrial, in light of the jury’s general verdict.” * * * It is likely, although not certain, that a major part of these damages was intended to “compensate” respondent for the abstract “value” of his [constitutional] rights. For these reasons, the case must be remanded for a new trial on compensatory damages.
Id. at 2546 (citation omitted).
In the final analysis, how much, if anything, the jurors awarded for the intrinsic value of Vosburg’s Eighth Amendment rights is destined to remain unknown and unknowable, given the cloistered nature of jury deliberations. Without this insight, the jury instruction at issue “constitutes an error ‘so obvious and prejudicial as to affect the fairness’ of the trial.” Ratliff, 820 F.2d at 798 (citation omitted). Although I can well understand the majority’s sympathy for Vosburg because I share in it, I see no escape from the conclusion dictated by Stachura and Ratliff, that we must remand for a new trial as to damages.

. While failure to object to a jury instruction is normally fatal, see Fed.R-Civ.P. 51, we retain the discretion to review error not preserved for appeal if that error is so prejudicial as to have "seriously affected the fairness, integrity or public reputation of judicial proceedings.” Rowe International, Inc., v. J.B. Enterprises, Inc., 647 F.2d 830, 835 (8th Cir.1981) (citation omitted). In Ratliff v. Wellington Exempted Village Schools Board of Education, 820 F.2d 792, 796-98 (6th Cir.1987), a case very near to the one before us, the court applied Stachura retroactively to nullify a damage award in a section 1983 action because the jury was instructed, without objection, to consider the intrinsic value of the plaintiffs constitutional rights. The Ratliff court’s discussion of the interplay between the plain error rule, Fed.R.Civ.P. 51, and the Supreme Court’s "retroactive application" doctrine, Bradley v. School Board of the City of Richmond, 416 U.S. 696, 711, 94 S.Ct. 2006, 2016, 40 L.Ed.2d 476 (1974), illuminates the reasons for retroactive application of the Sta-chura rule where no objection to a jury instruction has been made at trial.