Trial News

A jury could find prison employees were deliberately indifferent after an inmate was badly injured while unloading a laundry cart, the Sixth Circuit held, denying the employees qualified immunity. In reversing the district court, the Sixth Circuit joined at least five other circuit courts in finding that prison employees violate the Eighth Amendment when they disregard a known risk to a prisoner’s health and safety during the prisoner’s work. (Rhodes v. Michigan, 2021 WL 3730698 (6th Cir. Aug. 24, 2021).)

In 2015, on her second day working as a prison laundry porter at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Mich., inmate Kelly Jane Rhodes was badly injured when a 400-pound industrial laundry cart struck her. Rhodes had been waiting to unload carts of clean laundry from a truck when Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) employee Richard Jones pushed a cart, causing it to roll out of the truck, onto a hydraulic lift gate operated by MDOC employee Paul McPherson, and off onto Rhodes’s head. Rhodes suffered a traumatic brain injury, a fractured skull, fractural nasal bones, cranial bleeding, and lacerations.

Rhodes filed suit in 2017 in Michigan federal district court against the state of Michigan, MDOC, and several MDOC employees, including Jones and McPherson. She brought state law claims and claims under 42 U.S.C. §1983 for violations of her civil rights under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Only Rhodes’s §1983 claims against Jones and McPherson remained after the court considered the defendants’ summary judgment motion.

Rhodes alleged that Jones and McPherson violated her Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment by “failing to protect” her given “their special, custodial relationship.” She also brought substantive due process claims under the Fourteenth Amendment based on the “state-created-danger” doctrine and the defendants’ alleged violations of her bodily integrity.

On the Eighth Amendment claim, the district court found that McPherson did not meet the recklessness culpability standard—and although there was a factual dispute about whether Jones had been deliberately indifferent, his actions did not violate a “clearly established” right. The court granted summary judgment to the defendants based on qualified immunity.

On the due process claims, the district court found that the Eighth, rather than Fourteenth Amendment, was the appropriate basis for Rhodes’s bodily integrity claim. In addition, Rhodes’s state-created-danger claim failed, the court said, because such claims must include an allegation that the defendant “created or increased the risk of harm by a private third-party actor”—whereas Rhodes alleged that the defendants caused her harm.

The Sixth Circuit agreed with the district court on the due process claims but reversed as to the Eighth Amendment claim. For Jones and McPherson to be granted qualified immunity, the court said, Rhodes must allege facts showing their conduct violated a constitutional right and that that right is “clearly established.” The Eighth Amendment protects prisoners from “cruel and unusual punishment”—and while this does not include “every harm or injury suffered in prison,” the appellate court said, it does include instances where a prisoner can “show that the prison officials acted with ‘deliberate indifference’ to a substantial risk [of] serious harm.” (Curry v. Scott, 249 F.3d 493 (6th Cir. 2001).)

The court found that unloading 400-pound laundry carts that are prone to tipping with only one’s hands for protection objectively poses a substantial risk of serious harm. And based on both Jones’s and McPherson’s testimony, a jury could find they both appreciated the risk of serious injury to Rhodes when unloading the cart but acted with deliberate indifference.

The court then considered whether Rhodes’s Eighth Amendment right was “clearly established” and whether “a reasonable officer would understand that what he is doing violates that right.” (Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635 (1987).) The court looked to whether, at the time of the incident, it was clear that the Eighth Amendment’s “conditions-of-confinement protections” apply to prison work conditions—specifically, whether the defendants violated Rhodes’s constitutional rights by knowingly or recklessly disregarding a “known excessive risk” to her health and safety. Though the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet applied the Eighth Amendment to unsafe prison work conditions, the Second, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits—and the Sixth Circuit in unpublished opinions—have concluded that dangerous prison work conditions can support an Eighth Amendment claim. This precedent, the court said, was sufficient to put Jones and McPherson on notice that their reckless disregard of the risk to Rhodes’s safety violated her Eighth Amendment rights. Consequently, the court reversed the district court’s decision granting summary judgment to the defendants.

White Lake, Mich., attorney Shawn C. Cabot, who argued for the plaintiff before the Sixth Circuit, called the decision “a victory for basic human rights for those in correctional institutions across the United States.” He added that “just because someone is within the confines of a jail or prison does not mean that their constitutional and civil rights have been stripped from them—but too often this is exactly what occurs. Inmates are too often forced to endure dangerous working conditions and situations that are unlawful and otherwise run afoul of the basic protections that would ordinarily be present in workplaces outside of penal institutions.” Inmates can rely on this decision, he said, “to ensure that they have a safe work environment.”