from the second-class-citizens dept
“Qualified immunity” is included nowhere in the Bill of Rights. But that’s because it’s not your right. It’s a right that only exists because the Supreme Court said it should exist. And ever since it made this proclamation, it’s done everything it can to ensure this judicial doctrine can swallow nearly any rights violation thrown at it.
Qualified immunity giveth and taketh away. It giveth get-out-of-lawsuit-free cards to cops and taketh away their accountability. “No checks. No balances.,” to paraphrase the Ayn Randiest of our population.
Consequently, we get this sort of thing (highlighted by Gabriel Malor on Bluesky) far too often: the conclusion that rights have most likely been violated, followed by judges stating after a dramatic pause something to the effect of “well, but the people who make and enforce the laws really had no way of knowing that.”
That’s the conclusion the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court arrives [PDF] at following several pages of discussion, even when a lot of that discussion deals with credible claims of deliberate indifference and things that certainly look a whole lot like cruel (but, sadly, not all that unusual) punishment.
Prisoner Abre Jackson was sent to solitary confinement following an altercation with guards — something expedited by an “adjustment hearing,” which was a one-sided affair where Jackson was allowed to raise his claims against the officers, but not allowed to call witnesses or demand presentation of jail recordings of the altercation.
Things went from bad to worse following this so-called “hearing.” Jackson was sentenced to three months in solitary confinement. This is how Jackson described it in his lawsuit:
In a declaration opposing defendants’ motion for summary judgment, Jackson asserted that his disciplinary segregation cell, unlike Pontiac’s general population area, had feces and urine on the walls, constant noise with inmates banging on cell doors, water contaminated with bacteria that causes Legionnaire’s disease, and roaches and mice. He also said that inmates in the disciplinary segregation cells, unlike inmates in general population, throw feces and urine at other inmates when they are in the hallways.
The lower court couldn’t even be bothered to find anything wrong with this, ruling that Jackson had no “sufficient” protected liberty interest in being held in a cell that didn’t contain other people’s waste products, bacteria-infested water, vermin, or in the vicinity of other inmates who tended to use their human waste products as projectiles.
The Appeals Court says the allegations in this case sure look enough like rights violations they should probably be placed in front of a jury:
A reasonable jury could conclude that the combined effects of Jackson’s three-month assignment to disciplinary segregation and the conditions of his segregation imposed what Sandin called “an atypical and significant hardship.” 515 U.S. at 484. If so, then Jackson was deprived of a liberty interest entitling him to the “minimum procedures appropriate under the circumstances” to ensure the “protection of the individual against arbitrary action of government.”
Then it goes completely in the other direction:
We do not decide that issue because, as we explain next, the defendants are entitled to qualified immunity on the liberty interest question.
And that means guards and prisons can continue to shove inmates into filthy cells and generally ignore any obligation to care for their health and well-being because this court — for whatever reason — has decided it’s not actually going to make a judgment call on the constitutionality of the alleged acts. Instead, it will give the government the benefit of a doubt, because the fewer times the government exercises any common sense or discretion, the less likely it is that the next case with similar facts will result in the removal of qualified immunity protections.
Also, the court says that while the circumstances were admittedly awful, they just weren’t awful enough to either (1) declare this a rights violation with a precedential decision, or (2) roll back immunity so the facts could be further developed by the trial court.
On the conditions factor, the conditions Jackson alleges here, though “more severe than those found in the general prison population,” are “hardly analogous to a confinement that deprives a prisoner of all human contact or sensory stimuli,” Hardaway, 734 F.3d at 744, like the conditions the Supreme Court found sufficient to create a liberty interest in Wilkinson. And on the duration factor, Jackson has not “presented case law stating that a [three]-month period of confinement under conditions similar to [his] implicates a liberty interest.”
When your only “human contact” is the involuntary reception of their hurled fecal matter, harsher solitary conditions might actually be preferable, especially if those cells were a bit freer of vermin and/or contaminated water. And the court saying three months of confinement under these conditions just isn’t terrible enough to justify further examination by the judicial system says probably more than the court intended to say about its general attitude towards plaintiffs who also happen to be convicted criminals.
The government wins again and it’s a clean win that doesn’t establish any new boundaries for it to begrudgingly respect. This prison and its employees can go right back to doing the sorts of things they did to this plaintiff, virtually assured of escaping any future lawsuits by mumbling the same things about a lack of precedent that might indicate otherwise. And the government’s reaction to lawsuits like this is never “oh, that was close, maybe we’d better fix some stuff.” It’s always the same thing: let’s just keep abusing people repeatedly until someone finally makes us stop.
Filed Under: 7th circuit, 8th amendment, prison conditions, qualified immunity, solitary confinement
