Arnzen v. Palmer

• Citation: 713 F.3d 369
• Decision Date: 22 April 2013
• Docket Number: No. 12–3634.,12–3634.
• Parties: John W. ARNZEN, III; Harold Williams; Galen K. Shaffer; Edward Lee Briggs, Appellees v. Director Charles PALMER; Jason Smith; Brad Wittrock, Appellants.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (8th Circuit)

713 F.3d 369

John W. ARNZEN, III; Harold Williams; Galen K. Shaffer; Edward Lee Briggs, Appellees

v.Director Charles PALMER; Jason Smith; Brad Wittrock, Appellants.

No. 12–3634.

United States Court of Appeals,

Eighth Circuit.

Submitted: April 8, 2013.

Filed: April 22, 2013.

Gretchen Kraemer, AAG, Des Moines, IA, for appellant.

Pamela Ann Wingert, Spirit Lake, IA, for appellee.

Before BYE, ARNOLD and BENTON, Circuit Judges.

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.

Patients at the Iowa Civil Commitment Unit for Sex Offenders (CCUSO) filed a complaint under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 challenging the placement of video cameras in CCUSO restrooms, and moved for a preliminary injunction to stop their use. The district court ¹ denied the motion as to cameras in the “dormitory style restrooms” (restrooms with multiple toilets, showers and sinks) but granted a preliminary injunction ordering that cameras in the “traditional style bathrooms” (bathrooms with a single toilet, sink, and shower) be pointed at the ceiling or covered with a lens cap. The administrators of CCUSO appeal and we affirm.

The plaintiffs are civilly and involuntarily committed to CCUSO, a secure facility meant for the “control, care, and treatment of ... person[s] determined to be ... sexually violent predator[s].” SeeIowa Code § 229A.7(7). After a reported sexual assault and an instance in which “a patient with a serious communicable disease engaged in consensual sex with another patient whom he did not inform about his condition,” the administrators installed cameras in all bathrooms, including those that are, as described by the district court, “similar to what people commonly have in their home with a toilet, shower, and sink in a smaller room.” Some of these single-user restrooms have doors while others have what the administrators describe as “T-junction[s]” in place of doors. Some with doors can be locked from the outside by staff but not by users inside the restroom, and two in a non-residential area can be locked by patients from inside; no rule prohibits multiple patients from being inside a single-user restroom at the same time. The administrators stated in the district court that the facility has at least some cameras that record “comings and goings to and from the restroom but not inside the restroom.”

While cameras in the common areas of CCUSO are monitored, those inside the single-user restrooms are not; instead, they record images that are generally erased within 14 to 21 days when the system records over them. The recorded images are “masked” so that most of the subjects' bodies are covered with a black box, though several senior administrators have the ability to unmask the images if necessary for an investigation. The plaintiffs assert that the cameras placed in the single-user bathrooms are an unreasonable violation of their right to privacy, but the administrators contend that the cameras are needed to ensure the security of those committed to the institution and that the district court, when granting the injunction, failed to show sufficient “deference” to their “judgment” as “qualified professional[s],” see Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 322–23, 102 S.Ct. 2452, 73 L.Ed.2d 28 (1982).

We review the district court's grant of a preliminary injunction for an abuse of discretion and its factual findings for clear error. Barrett v. Claycomb, 705 F.3d 315, 320 (8th Cir.2013). A district court should evaluate four considerations when determining whether to issue a preliminary injunction: the threat of irreparable harm to the movant, the balance between this harm to the movant and the harm an injunction will cause other parties, the probability that the movant will prevail on the merits, and the public interest. Roudachevski v. All–American Care Ctrs., Inc., 648 F.3d 701, 706 (8th Cir.2011).

Because the probability of “[s]uccess on the merits has been referred to as the most important of the four factors,” see id., we consider it first. The Fourth Amendment protects persons against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. See, e.g., Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398, 403, 126 S.Ct. 1943, 164 L.Ed.2d 650 (2006). The administrators contend that no search or seizure occurs if nobody views the video images (though the record shows that they have viewed some of the videos in the past) and, if there is a search or seizure here, it plainly meets the Fourth Amendment reasonableness requirements.

A search occurs under the Fourth Amendment when, as relevant here, “the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable.” Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 31–33, 121 S.Ct. 2038, 150 L.Ed.2d 94 (2001); see also United States v. Jones, ––– U.S. ––––, 132 S.Ct. 945, 950, 181 L.Ed.2d 911 (2012). “[I]nvoluntarily civilly committed persons retain the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches that is analogous to the right retained by pretrial detainees.” Beaulieu v. Ludeman, 690 F.3d 1017, 1028 (8th Cir.2012). Although the expectation of privacy shared by involuntarily civilly committed persons and pretrial detainees is of a “diminished scope,” see Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 559, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979), neither our court nor the Supreme Court has ever outlined exactly what expectation of privacy these persons reasonably have, outside of our holding that detainees do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their jail cells, see United States v. Hogan, 539 F.3d 916, 923 (8th Cir.2008). We believe, though, that single-person bathrooms (intended for functions “ ‘traditionally shielded by great privacy’ ”) are inherently different from cells, and that a civilly committed person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a single-person bathroom when there is no immediate indication that it is being used for purposes other than those ordinarily associated with bathroom facilities. See Vernonia School Dist. 47J v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646, 658, 115 S.Ct. 2386, 132 L.Ed.2d 564 (1995) (quoting Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Assoc., 489 U.S. 602, 626, 109 S.Ct. 1402, 103 L.Ed.2d 639 (1989)); cf. United States v. Hill, 393 F.3d 839, 841 (8th Cir.2005). We therefore believe that by capturing images of patients while they occupy single-user bathrooms, CCUSO violated its patients' reasonable expectation of privacy, thus conducting a search under the Fourth Amendment, irrespective of whether there is some chance that those images will not be viewed, see Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 31–33, 121 S.Ct. 2038.

After we determine that the government's action is indeed a search, as we did here, we apply a so-called “balancing test” to determine whether the search or seizure of involuntarily committed individuals is reasonable, considering the “ ‘scope of the particular intrusion, the manner in which it is conducted, the justification for initiating it, and the place in which it is conducted.’ ” See Serna v. Goodno, 567 F.3d 944, 949 (8th Cir.2009), cert. denied,558 U.S. 972, 130 S.Ct. 465, 175 L.Ed.2d 312 (2009) (quoting Bell, 441 U.S. at 559, 99 S.Ct. 1861). We “must defer to the judgment of correctional officials unless the record contains substantial evidence showing their policies are an unnecessary or unjustified response to problems of institutional security.” Beaulieu, 690 F.3d at 1029 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).

The administrators point to our precedents allowing strip searches of civilly committed individuals for the purpose of finding contraband, see id. at 1027–30;Serna, 567 F.3d at 947–48, 952–56, and argue that their placement of the video cameras in the current circumstances is as necessary and justified as the strip searches in those cases. But the justification for those searches is quite different from the one offered for the video cameras here. In the cases the administrators rely on, the searches were meant to prevent dangerous contraband from entering the facilities, an immediate risk that was most easily prevented by strip searches. And we cautioned in Serna that if “the triggering evidence had been a prohibited but relatively benign object, ... it would have seemed, on balance,...