Summary
dismissing deliberate indifference claim where the defendant failed to secure an inmate on keeplock status because the conduct "was at most negligent"
Summary of this case from Blandon v. AitchisonOpinion
No. 98 Civ. 4704 (GEL).
May 17, 2001
Andrew F. Plasse, New York, New York, for Plaintiff Robert Cardew.
Steven N. Schulman, Assistant Attorney General, State of New York (Efrem Z. Fischer, Assistant Attorney General, and Eliot Spitzer, Attorney General, of counsel), New York, New York, for Defendant Carl Fleetwood.
OPINION AND ORDER
Robert Cardew, a prisoner who is currently incarcerated at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility, brings this action pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, charging that Carl Fleetwood, a corrections officer, violated his Eighth Amendment right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment by maliciously allowing another inmate to assault him. Officer Fleetwood moves for summary judgment, arguing that on the record before the Court, the complaint is without merit as a matter of law. The motion is granted, for the reasons set forth below.
The original complaint also charged a supervisory corrections officer, Lieutenant William Schaller, with violating plaintiffs right to due process in connection with a disciplinary hearing growing out of the same altercation. That claim was dismissed by Judge Sidney Stein on June 30, 1999.
BACKGROUND
The critical facts are for the most part undisputed. Plaintiff was convicted of second degree burglary in 1982 and second-degree murder in 1983, and was sentenced to consecutive sentences of, respectively, 1 1/2 to 4 1/2 years and 25 years to life. (Plasse Decl. Ex. E. at 17-19.) In January 1998, shortly after being transferred to Sing Sing, he was attacked by four other inmates, and was placed in voluntary protective custody. (Id. Ex. D at 12.) On March 19, 1998, another inmate in the protective custody unit, Paul Alexander, who had not been involved in the prior incident and who had had no prior verbal or physical altercations with Plaintiff, assaulted him by hitting him in the face with a bar of soap enclosed in a sock. (Id. at 36-38.) This latter incident forms the basis of the instant complaint.
At about 7:00 a.m. that day, defendant Fleetwood was assigned to work in the "bubble," a guard station supervising the unit where Cardew, Alexander, and several other prisoners were held (Fleetwood Aff. ¶ 4) The guard in the bubble can open the cells of the inmates on the unit by remote control from his post, but because he is physically locked into a secured area, he cannot leave the bubble. (Id. ¶ 15.)
Fleetwood initially opened only two cells, Cardew's and that of another inmate, since those two prisoners were assigned to work on the breakfast detail. (Plasse Decl. Ex. D at 24-25.) Shortly thereafter, he opened the remaining cells, allowing the other prisoners as well to leave their cells and mingle in the common area of the unit. (Id. at 26.) It is undisputed that this was a mistake, at least as to inmate Alexander, who was confined to his cell on "keep-lock" status for an earlier infraction and should not have been allowed to leave his cell. (Fleetwood Aff ¶¶ 5-9.)
Within minutes, Alexander took advantage of his release to attack another inmate, one Cibello, with his sock-and-soap mace. Cibello escaped by retreating to his cell and slamming the gate behind him. (Plasse Decl. Ex. D at 29.) Alexander then turned his attention to Cardew, hitting Cardew in the face three or four times (Id. at 30, 35.) The attack came too quickly for Cardew to defend himself or retreat into his cell, though he has testified that "[j]ust before [Alexander] started hitting me," he called out to get Fleetwood's attention, shouting "Yo, call the CO." (Id. at 36; see also id. at 31.) Cardew's cell, where this incident took place, was approximately fifty feet away from Fleetwood's station in the bubble. (Def.'s Reply to Pl.'s Rule 56.1 Statement ¶ 1.)
In pain and bleeding from his nostrils, Cardew reached out to grab Alexander, who dropped the sock and ran toward the guard station. (Plasse Decl. Ex. D at 36.) Cardew chased Alexander past a few cells, grabbed him by the arms, and got him in a headlock against one of the cells. (Id. at 37, 40.) During their struggle, Fleetwood called for assistance from other officers, who arrived within a minute, broke up the fight, and restored order. (Id. at 43-44.)
Only about thirty seconds elapsed from the moment Alexander first confronted Cibello to the time Fleetwood called for help; between ten and twenty seconds from the assault on Cardew until Fleetwood's response. (Id. at 42-43.) It is undisputed that Fleetwood was locked into the bubble and without access to the gallery where the fight took place. (Fleetwood Aff. ¶ 15.) He made a determination to call directly for assistance from the nearest officers, rather than to activate his "Personal Alarm System" or "Red Dot" alarm, which would have alerted the "Facility Emergency Response Team." That alarm sounds throughout the prison to call assistance from other officers to an emergency. (Id. ¶¶ 16-18.)
DISCUSSION
There is no question that prison officials owe a constitutional duty to those in their custody to keep them in secure conditions, and not callously to leave them to the mercies of other prisoners. This duty, however, does not require that prison guards accomplish the impossible task of preventing all fighting in a maximum-security institution filled with violent prisoners. "[A] prison official may be held liable under the Eighth Amendment for denying humane conditions of confinement only if he knows that inmates face a substantial risk of serious harm and disregards that risk by failing to take reasonable measures to abate it." Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 847 (1994). As the Second Circuit has held,
The deliberate indifference standard embodies both an objective and a subjective prong. First, the alleged deprivation must be, in objective terms, "sufficiently serious." Wilson v. Seiter, 501 U.S. 294, 298 (1991). See Nance v. Kelly, 912 F.2d 605, 607 (2d Cir. 1990) (Pratt, J., dissenting) (standard contemplates "a condition of urgency, one that may produce death, degeneration, or extreme pain") (citations omitted). Second, the charged official must act with a sufficiently culpable state of mind. See Wilson, 501 U.S. at 298. Deliberate indifference requires more than negligence, but less than conduct undertaken for the very purpose of causing harm. See Farmer v Brennan, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 1978 (1994). More specifically, a prison official does not act in a deliberately indifferent manner unless that official "knows of and disregards an excessive risk to inmate health or safety; the official must both be aware of facts from which the inference could be drawn that a substantial risk of serious harm exists, and he must also draw the inference." Id. at 1979.Hathaway v. Coughlin, 37 F.3d 63, 66 (2d Cir. 1994). On the undisputed facts, Cardew cannot satisfy this standard, since no reasonable jury could find that Fleetwood acted with deliberate indifference to his well-being.
Defendant argues that Cardew also fails to satisfy the objective standard, because sustaining several blows to the face from a sock-and-soap weapon, resulting in a black eye and a nosebleed, is not "in objective terms, sufficiently serious." (Def's Reply Mem. Supp. Summ. J. at 4, quoting Hathaway.) It is true that the actual outcome of the attack was not "death, degeneration or extreme pain." (Id.) But the Court is not prepared to say that if an officer responded with deliberate, conscious indifference to a violent attack by one prisoner on another, the risk to inmate safety thus disregarded is not, as a matter of law, extreme. The dangers in such violent encounters are unpredictable and potentially deadly. While not "every injury suffered by one prisoner at the hands of another translates into constitutional liability for prison officials responsible for the victim's safety," Farmer, 511 U.S. at 834, "being violently assaulted in prison is simply not part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses against society."Id. at 834 (internal quotations omitted).
Cardew complains of three potential derelictions on Fleetwood's part: first, that Alexander should not, under prison rules, have been allowed loose on the gallery at all, since he was in keep lock status; second, that Fleetwood should have responded more quickly to the assault, when Cardew called out to him; and third, that Fleetwood should have activated the "Red Dot Alarm" rather than calling to nearby officers to respond to the situation. (Pl's Mem. Opp. Summ. J. at 6-9.) None of these alleged mistakes could possibly be found by a reasonable jury to constitute deliberate indifference to Cardew's safety.
First, Fleetwood's opening of Alexander's cell door was at most negligent. There is a dispute about whether Fleetwood knew or should have known of Alexander's keep-lock status. At the time of the incident in question, there was an established practice at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility of placing red tags on cell doors of those inmates on keep-lock status. Fleetwood has averred that on the day of the incident, Alexander's cell door did not have a red tag affixed to it. (Fleetwood Aff. ¶ 8.) Cardew, however, has testified that it was well known in the cell block that Alexander was on keep-lock status. (Plasse Decl. Ex. D at 32.) But even assuming, as the Court must at the summary judgment stage, that a jury might find that Fleetwood should have known that Alexander should have been kept under lock, that fact alone is insufficient to support a conclusion that Fleetwood was deliberately indifferent to a serious risk to the safety of the other inmates on the floor. Even if Alexander was in keep-lock for a disciplinary infraction, there is no indication in the record that Alexander was, let alone that he was known by Fleetwood to be, an uncontrollably violent or unusually dangerous inmate. Indeed, Cardew reported perfectly cordial prior conversations with Alexander, prior to the incident, about his upcoming disciplinary hearing (Plasse Decl. Ex. D at 21), and it is undisputed that Alexander had not threatened Cardew or any of the other inmates in the unit prior to this sudden and unprovoked attack. (Id. at 15.) There is thus nothing from which a reasonable factfinder could find that Fleetwood released Alexander in conscious disregard of a substantial risk that serious harm would be inflicted on anyone.
Second, a reasonable jury could not find either that Fleetwood deliberately failed to respond to the attack on Cardew, or that, if he did, that failure caused Cardew's injuries. Cardew testified that the attack on him was so sudden and unexpected that he had no opportunity even to raise his arm to protect himself or to retreat into his cell. (Id. at 30-31.) At most, he called out in an effort to get the attention of the guard fifty feet away in the bubble. (Id. at 31-32, 36.) Cardew has testified that Fleetwood was looking in his direction at the time. (Id. at 35.) But even assuming arguendo that Fleetwood saw what was occurring, the undisputed fact is that he called other officers to the scene within ten to twenty seconds. A "delay" (if it is proper so to characterize it) of at most twenty seconds in responding to such a sudden incident cannot objectively be assessed as unreasonable, let alone as deliberate indifference. Moreover, even a quicker response could not have prevented Alexander's blows, since it may have taken as long as one minute for the nearest available officers to arrive on the scene (id. at 42-44, 46), so that even if Fleetwood had called for help immediately at the first instant Cardew cried out, the officers would not have arrived in time to stop the assault. No reasonable juror could find that Fleetwood's quite prompt and effective response, in a sudden, emergency situation, was somehow insufficiently prompt to satisfy the Constitution.
Third, for similar reasons, Fleetwood's decision to call for the nearest officers rather than to alert the entire prison by pressing an emergency alarm was entirely reasonable. The incident was hardly a full-fledged riot requiring massive response: Cardew was able to subdue Alexander by himself, and several guards were present in the immediate area, more than enough to control the situation. Fleetwood clearly made the correct choice, but even if the question were closer, questioning Fleetwood's choice of response would amount to precisely the type of impermissible judicial second-guessing of prison officials that the Supreme Court has cautioned against:
[I]n making and carrying out decisions involving the use of force to restore order in the face of a prison disturbance, prison officials undoubtedly must take into account the very real threats the unrest presents to inmates and prison officials alike, in addition to the possible harms to inmates against whom force might be used.Whitley v. Albers, 475 U.S. 312, 320 (1986).
Even taking Cardew's version of the incident as undisputed, his claims are entirely without merit. Summary judgment for Defendant Fleetwood is therefore appropriate.
CONCLUSION
Defendant's motion for summary judgment is granted. The Clerk of Court is respectfully directed to enter judgment in favor of defendant.
SO ORDERED