Court Opinion

ID: 9468822
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:24:33.932054+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:04.357487
License: Public Domain

SAM D. JOHNSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Believing that the plurality has misapprehended the essence of the plaintiffs’ allegations, this dissent is respectfully submitted.
The linchpin of the inmate plaintiffs’ thesis that the conditions of confinement in Mississippi’s eighty-two county jails can be addressed in a single action is their contention that there exists in the state government of Mississippi ultimate authority over, and responsibility for, those aspects of detention subject to constitutional scrutiny. The plaintiffs find three sources of this central authority. The first is in the constitution itself. Citing then-district court Chief Judge Frank M. Johnson’s resolution of Adams v. Mathis, 458 F.Supp. 302 (M.D. Ala.1978), affirmed, 614 F.2d 42 (5th Cir. 1980), the inmates contend that the State of Mississippi is under an affirmative obligation, mandated by the fourteenth amendment, to ensure that persons incarcerated in its political subdivisions by virtue of its state laws are not deprived their constitutional rights. They find expression of this obligation in Adams’ statement that
When a state or county takes a citizen into custody, the state assumes the responsibility for that individual’s physical and mental health. Newman v. State of Alabama, 349 F.Supp. 278 (M.D.Ala.1972), affirmed in part, 503 F.2d 1320 (5th Cir. 1974), cert. denied, 421 U.S. 948, 95 S.Ct. 1680, 44 L.Ed.2d 102 (1975).. . .
The appropriate state officials have the duty of supervising the acts of its agents who are authorized by state law to operate a jail in one of its political subdivisions. This constitutional duty to supervise includes three basic elements: To clearly and specifically define the scope of the authority delegated through the promulgation of detailed rules and regulations; to keep informed as to the conduct, of the agents through regular and thorough inspections; and to take all action necessary to correct the conduct of the agents operating the jails in the political subdivisions, through vigorous enforcement of the established standards and through direct assistance. See Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 267 F.Supp. 458 (M.D.Ala.) (three-judge court), affirmed sub nom. Wallace v. United States, 389 U.S. 215, 88 S.Ct. 415, 19 L.Ed.2d 422 (1967); Washington v. Lee, 263 F.Supp. 327 (M.D.Ala.1966) (three-judge court), affirmed, 390 U.S. 333, 88 S.Ct. 994, 19 L.Ed.2d 1212 (1968).
Id. at 308, 309 (citations omitted) (emphasis added).
Their second source of central authority is in Mississippi’s own state statutes. They point, inter alia, to section 7-1-5, Miss.Code Ann. (1981), which has been interpreted by the Mississippi Supreme Court to vest in the governor executive authority over every county of the state, and the power to enforce local officers’ performance of their obligations if those local officers fail to act. State v. McPhail, 182 Miss. 360, 180 So. 387 (Miss.1938). They refer the Court to the State Fire Marshall’s duty to promulgate and enforce the provision of the Mississippi Fire Prevention Code so to ensure that structures in the State of Mississippi do not pose a threat to life or health, sections 45-11-101 through 110, Miss.Code Ann. (1981), and to his duty to initiate legal proceedings to correct “hazardous inflammable conditions existing in any building that would tend to impair the safety of persons or property,” section 45-11-3, Miss. Code Ann. (1981) (emphasis added). And they direct the Court’s attention to the duties of the Chief Medical Officer and the State Board of Health 1 to prescribe sanitary regulations for public buildings, including prisons, and to enforce these regulations in the several counties through supervision of county health officers. Sections 41-3—1 et seq., Miss.Code Ann. (1981).
Finally, the inmates argue that had they not been denied all discovery, they would have demonstrated that in fact the State of *340Mississippi exercises control over significant portions of the conditions of confinement prevailing in the state’s county jails.
The district court rejected the plaintiffs’ attempt to hold the state responsible for the conditions existent in its county jails. Its analysis of the issue was limited, however, to review and rejection of that part of the plaintiffs’ argument based on the state statutory scheme.2 The district court did not address at all their argument derived from the constitution, and it found that the limited evidence presented accorded with its conclusion that the county jails were autonomous entities having widely disparate conditions of confinement.
The plaintiff inmates’ tripartite contention of central responsibility in the State of Mississippi for the conditions prevailing in its county jails is virtually unacknowledged in the plurality’s disposition of their appeal. Despite the plaintiffs’ clear exposition of these arguments in their appellate presentation, the plurality addresses only that element of the state’s responsibility running to state prisoners incarcerated in county facilities. The petitioners did indeed argue that orders issued in the course of litigation challenging the conditions of confinement in state penitentiaries applied equally to state prisoners housed in county jails. But the district court’s endorsement of these contentions by its subsequent extension of the extant injunctive relief to state prisoners in county jails, Gates v. Collier, G.C. 71-6-K (N.D.Miss. May 20, 1981), did not diminish the vitality of their concurrent contentions that these same obligations are owed to county prisoners and pre-trial detainees housed in county institutions.
The plurality does not address these remaining arguments. Indeed, it declines to address them, stating
Whether such responsibility exists by virtue of the relationship between Mississippi state and county governments, or by virtue of the Eighth Amendment, is not addressed by the 1977 statute, nor is it adequately addressed by the district court’s opinion or the briefs in this court. Accordingly, we have no occasion in this case to delineate the precise extent of the state’s responsibility for conditions in the county jails. See generally Jones v. Diamond, 594 F.2d 997, 1006-08 (5th Cir. 1979) (describing the intricate statutory scheme regulating the county jails), vacated en banc, 636 F.2d 1364 (5th Cir. 1981); State v. McPhail, 182 Miss. 360, 180 So. 387, 390 (1938) (governor is executive officer in every county); Miss.Code Ann. §§ 19-1-1 et seq. (1972) (defining the counties and their powers and duties); id. §§ 97-1-1 et seq. (state criminal code; violations of state law are often punishable by sentences in county jails).
At 333 n.9. There is no disagreement that the 1977 statute does not resolve the issue of state responsibility for the conditions prevailing in county jails, and that the district court’s cursory examination of the plaintiffs’ theory of statutorily-imposed responsibility provides a most unsatisfactory grounding for appellate consideration of this “intricate statutory scheme[’s],” id., allocation of responsibilities. But the issue has been squarely raised, joined, and partially treated below. It requires consideration on appeal.
Denial of this pivotal aspect of the plaintiffs’ theory of liability dictated the plurality’s disposition of the remainder of the case. The absence of a central responsibility and authority rendered the plurality’s search for commonality among the conditions prevailing in the several county jails futile from the outset. Factual equivalency among the actual conditions of confinement in Missis*341sippi’s eighty-two county jails is not to be expected. It was not the ground for the plaintiffs’ allegation that the conditions at the several jails raised a “common question of law or fact,” Fed.R.Civ.Pro. 23(a)(2). Nor was the ground of commonality the “abstract issue” of a series of unconnected violations of a “general legal standard.” At 337. Rather, the ground (at the risk of redundancy) was the charge that the state government held a central obligation, under its laws and the laws of the land, to those incarcerated in institutions of its policial subdivisions.
Conception of the case as an attempt to impress a large number of disparate and unrelated situations into a single action fed also the conclusion that the pleadings justified the district court’s pretermission of discovery. The absence of recognition of plaintiffs’ theory of unified obligation eliminates the need to acknowledge that the paucity of facts regarding the responsibility in state officials, and the plaintiffs’ consequent inability to prove the existence of common questions of law or fact, may well be attributable to the district court’s intrad-iction of a 11 discovery by the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs vigorously argue that, in order to make their case of actual control by the state sufficient to justify holding state officials responsible for a state-wide correction of county jail conditions, it was essential for them to accumulate information on the degree of actual involvement of state officials in state policy of the conduct of county jails. Such a request should be denied only if the absence of such involvement is clearly apparent. It is not clearly apparent here.
The issues posed by the plaintiffs are not simply answered. It is also surely true that this litigation, if permitted to proceed, would not travel an easy path. The plurality is correct in the observation that the action would require examination of the conditions of confinement in all of the county facilities. But such an action would be no more unwieldy than challenges to multiple facility systems, cf. Ruiz v. Estelle, 503 F.Supp. 1265 (S.D.Tex.1980), stayed in part, 650 F.2d 555 (5th Cir. 1981); indeed, if, in the end, it is determined that a central responsibility does vest in the state, the action in its single adjudication of that responsibility and its interaction with the responsibility of county officials would be, to some degree, simpler than multiple actions challenging separately the conditions prevailing at each county jail.
This writer would remand the case of opening of discovery and for full consideration of the plaintiffs’ various theories of the state’s obligation for the conditions of confinement at its county jails.

. See note 2, infra.

. The district court indicated that it found merit in the plaintiffs’ contention that the State Board of Health bears responsibility for the sanitary conditions of the county jails through its statutory duty to supervise the county boards of health. The court, however, disregarded this indicia of state involvement with the conditions prevailing at county jails because the State Board of Health was not named as a defendant. The district court did not consider the extent, if any, to which the State Board of Health is controlled in the performance of its general obligations by either the Chief Medical Officer or the • Governor, see §§ 41-3-5 and 41-3-19, Miss.Code Ann. (1981), both of whom are named defendants.