Bryant v. Madigan

• Citation: 84 F.3d 246
• Decision Date: 17 May 1996
• Docket Number: No. 95-2349,95-2349
• Parties: 5 A.D. Cases 833, 16 A.D.D. 317, 8 NDLR P 76 Ronald G. BRYANT, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. David MADIGAN, Nancy Griffin, and Dorothy Mulcahey, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (7th Circuit)

Page 246

84 F.3d 246

5 A.D. Cases 833, 16 A.D.D. 317, 8 NDLR P 76

Ronald G. BRYANT, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. David MADIGAN, Nancy Griffin, and Dorothy Mulcahey Defendants-Appellees.

No. 95-2349.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Submitted March 14, 1996.

Decided May 17, 1996.

Ronald G. Bryant (submitted), Urbana, IL, pro se.

Lorna K. Geiler, Meyer, Capel, Hirschfeld, Muncy, Jahn & Aldeen, Champaign, IL, James C. Dedman, Office of the State's Attorney of Champaign County, Urbana, IL, for David Madigan, Nancy Griffin, Dorothy Mulcahey.

Before POSNER, Chief Judge, and MANION and KANNE, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Chief Judge.

Bryant, an Illinois state prisoner, brought this damages suit against his keepers, complaining that they had refused his request for guardrails for his bed and that as a result he had broken his leg when a severe leg spasm caused him to fall out of bed. (Bryant is a paraplegic, and leg spasms are a symptom of his condition.) He also complains that after the operation to fix his leg he was denied pain medication. He claims that the defendants' conduct violated both the Eighth Amendment and the Americans With Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 12101 et seq. The district judge granted summary judgment for the defendants. In reliance on an affidavit and deposition by medical practitioners he concluded that the defendants had not been deliberately indifferent to Bryant's medical needs. And he held that the disabilities act is inapplicable to Bryant's claim.

In basing his decision on the affidavit and deposition when he did, the district judge jumped the gun, in violation of the rule of Lewis v. Faulkner, 689 F.2d 100 (7th Cir.1982), that an unrepresented party must be notified of the consequences of failing to respond to evidence presented in support of his opponent's motion for summary judgment with evidence of his own; must be told, in short, that he cannot rest on his pleadings. After the defendants submitted their evidence, the judge "granted [the parties] an additional fourteen days to submit any further materials permitted by Fed.R.Civ.P. 56," but did not say anything about the consequences for Bryant if he failed to take up this invitation. We cannot say that the error was harmless, and we must therefore remand Bryant's Eighth Amendment claim to the district court.

The second question presented by the appeal is the applicability of the disabilities act to correctional facilities. The question has divided the circuits. See Torcasio v. Murray, 57 F.3d 1340 (4th Cir.1995), which discusses the cases interpreting the Americans With Disabilities Act and the materially identical Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 794. Title II of the ADA, the title that concerns public services, provides that "no qualified individual with a disability shall, on the basis of disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefit of the services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by any public entity." 42 U.S.C. § 12131. The term "public entity" is defined to include any instrumentality of state or local government. § 12131(1). There is no express exclusion of jails and prisons. A total exclusion would mean that the states had no duty to avoid discriminating against, and no duty to accommodate the reasonable needs of, persons who wanted to work as correctional officers, lawyers who had clients in jail or prison whom they wanted to visit, or, as in Pack v. Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility, 894 P.2d 34, 39 (Colo.App.1995), other visitors.

Even if such persons are protected, however, which we need not decide (for Congress may not have wanted to burden the states with the potentially enormous costs of making their prisons fully accessible to disabled visitors and employees), it would not necessarily follow that prisons or jails that offer educational or vocational programs for prisoners must redesign their programs to accommodate the needs of disabled prisoners. It is very far from clear that prisoners should be considered "qualified individual[s]" within the meaning of the Act. Could Congress really have intended disabled prisoners to be mainstreamed into an already highly restricted prison society? Most rights of free Americans, including constitutional rights such as the right to free speech, to the free exercise of religion, and to marry, are curtailed when asserted by prisoners; and there are formidable practical objections to burdening prisons with having to comply with the onerous requirements of the Act, especially when we reflect that alcoholism and other forms of addiction are disabilities within the meaning of the Act and afflict a substantial proportion of the prison population. Although there is authority that prisoners employed in the prison may be protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Baker v. McNeil Island Corrections Center, 859 F.2d 124, 128 (9th Cir.1988), there is contrary authority, Williams v. Meese, 926 F.2d 994, 997 (10th Cir.1991); and arguments that prisoners employed within the prison (as distinct from prisoners on work release) are protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act and thus entitled to the federal minimum wage have been uniformly rejected. E.g., Vanskike...