Court Opinion

ID: 9449301
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:01:09.067454+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:21.727076
License: Public Domain

NOT FOR PUBLICATION                           FILED
                    UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS                        AUG 4 2023
                                                                      MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
                                                                       U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
                           FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

EVERETT SPILLARD,                               No.    21-16772

                Plaintiff-Appellant,            D.C. No. 4:19-cv-01407-JST

 v.
                                                MEMORANDUM*
IVERS, Nurse; BURLESON, Dr.,

                Defendants-Appellees,

and

CALIFORNIA FORENSIC MEDICAL
GROUP INC.; et al.,

                Defendants.

                   Appeal from the United States District Court
                     for the Northern District of California
                     Jon S. Tigar, District Judge, Presiding

                        Argued and Submitted June 7, 2023
                            San Francisco, California

Before: MILLER and KOH, Circuit Judges, and MOLLOY,** District Judge.
Concurrence by Judge MILLER.

      *
             This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent
except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.
      **
              The Honorable Donald W. Molloy, United States District Judge for
the District of Montana, sitting by designation.
      Plaintiff-Appellant Everett Spillard has diabetes and suffers from chronic

nerve pain. He sued Defendants-Appellees Iver Lien, N.P. and Michael Burleson,

M.D. under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for giving him psychotropic medication without his

consent while he was in pretrial detention at the Humboldt County Jail. The

district court found Defendants-Appellees were entitled to qualified immunity and

granted summary judgment in their favor on that basis. We have jurisdiction under

28 U.S.C. § 1291, and we reverse.

      1. The district court erred in granting summary judgment in favor of

Defendants-Appellees on the basis of qualified immunity. Because Defendants-

Appellees are privately employed medical providers, the defense of qualified

immunity is categorically unavailable. Jensen v. Lane County, 222 F.3d 570, 577–

79 (9th Cir. 2000). Moreover, Defendants-Appellees do not seek to rely on such a

defense on appeal and waived it by failing to raise it below. See Wakefield v.

ViSalus, Inc., 51 F.4th 1109, 1119 (9th Cir. 2022).

      2. Nor do the alternative bases argued by Defendants-Appellees support

affirmance. See MacIntyre v. Carroll Coll., 48 F.4th 950, 956 (9th Cir. 2022).

Contrary to their position, the due process rights “to be free from unjustified

intrusions to the body, to refuse unwanted medical treatment and to receive

sufficient information to exercise these rights intelligently,” Benson v. Terhune,

304 F.3d 874, 884 (9th Cir. 2002) (citations omitted), are not categorically limited

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to antipsychotic drugs, see id. at 880–81, or situations where the drug at issue is

administered for mental health reasons, id. at 877–78, 884; see also Johnson v.

Meltzer, 134 F.3d 1393, 1397 (9th Cir. 1998) (applying informed consent in the

context of U-74,006F, an experimental drug “typically used to treat patients with

severe head injuries to control intracranial pressure”). The record shows that

nortriptyline is “pharmacologically categorized as an antidepressant medication,”

and had the potential for serious side effects. Factual questions also remain as to

whether Spillard’s use of the drug was involuntary or unwanted, as Spillard was

not aware that the medication he was taking was nortriptyline until he was

transferred out of Humboldt County Jail. Therefore, Riggins v. Nevada, 504 U.S.

127 (1992), is not categorically inapplicable to the circumstances here. When the

facts are viewed in the light favorable to Spillard, as they must be at this stage, this

is a case of unwanted administration of medication to which Riggins and its

progeny applies. Under Riggins, Defendants-Appellees have not shown as a matter

of law that their administration of nortriptyline was (1) medically appropriate and

(2) justified by the circumstances. Id. at 135. Therefore, we decline to affirm the

grant of summary judgment on alternative grounds.

      REVERSED AND REMANDED.

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                                                                    FILED
Spillard v. Ivers, No. 21-16772                                      AUG 4 2023
                                                                 MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
MILLER, Circuit Judge, concurring in the judgment:                U.S. COURT OF APPEALS

      I agree with the court—and, it seems, both parties—that, because the

defendants are private medical providers and not government employees, the

district court erred in granting them qualified immunity. See Jensen v. Lane Cnty.,

222 F.3d 570, 577–79 (9th Cir. 2000). I also agree that, on the current record, we

should not affirm the grant of summary judgment on an alternative ground.

Because I reach that conclusion for different reasons than the court, I concur only

in the judgment.

      A prison or jail inmate has a right to be free from “unwanted administration”

of a psychiatric drug. Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210, 221 (1990). We have

held that the right against unwanted administration of psychiatric drugs includes a

right to “receive sufficient information to exercise [the right] intelligently.” Benson

v. Terhune, 304 F.3d 874, 884 (9th Cir. 2002). But we have not clearly explained

how much information is “sufficient,” and today’s disposition does not try to

answer that question either. The court emphasizes that “Spillard was not aware that

the medication he was taking was nortriptyline,” but it does not say why Spillard

needed that information in order to make his treatment voluntary.

      No court has held that an inmate must receive every piece of information

about a psychiatric drug in order for the administration of that drug to be voluntary.

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Such a rule would require the inmate to be given a list of every possible side effect,

together with the complete results of all clinical trials. Instead, courts have applied

a deliberate-indifference standard and, relatedly, required that prison medical staff

respond to inmates’ reasonable questions about their treatment. See, e.g., Pabon v.

Wright, 459 F.3d 241, 251 (2d Cir. 2006); White v. Napoleon, 897 F.2d 103, 113

(3d Cir. 1990). Our decision in Benson is consistent with that approach. There, in

declining to find that unwanted administration of drugs had occurred, we

emphasized that Benson was capable of asking for more information about the

drugs but did not do so. See 304 F.3d at 883–85 (explaining that because Benson

could have asked medical providers for information about her course of treatment,

but did not, they had no obligation to help her develop “an understanding of what

drugs she was taking and their potential side effects”).

      Under those principles, Spillard had a right to some information about his

course of treatment, but only the information that a minimally competent, non-

indifferent physician would have provided. Nortriptyline is apparently in common

use for neuropathic pain, and the defendants need not have preemptively disclosed

every side effect of the drug. Nevertheless, the failure to tell Spillard about the

drug’s function as an antidepressant, or simply to identify the name of the drug for

him—even though he never asked for that information—might conceivably

represent “such a substantial departure from professional judgment, practice or

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standards” as to implicate Spillard’s right against unwanted administration. White,

897 F.2d at 113.

      At present, it is unclear whether Spillard would prevail under this standard,

or indeed whether he could make a showing that would be sufficient to survive

summary judgment. But “[b]ecause the parties did not address these issues directly

in their motions and responses regarding summary judgment in the trial court, the

record may not be complete.” Jensen, 222 F.3d at 580. Although “[w]e may affirm

summary judgment on any grounds supported by the record,” Arcona, Inc. v.

Farmacy Beauty, LLC, 976 F.3d 1074, 1077 (9th Cir. 2020) (emphasis added), it is

sometimes a better practice to leave such issues “for the district court to consider in

the first instance,” Nunies v. HIE Holdings, Inc., 908 F.3d 428, 437 n.8 (9th Cir.

2018). I would “decline to decide the appropriateness of summary judgment” at

this juncture. Jensen, 222 F.3d at 580. Instead, I would reverse and remand to the

district court for further proceedings on the issue of voluntariness.

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