Castro v. Cnty. of L.A.

• Decision Date: 15 August 2016
• Docket Number: No. 12–56829,12–56829
• Citation: 833 F.3d 1060
• Parties: Jonathan Michael Castro, Plaintiff–Appelle, v. County of Los Angeles; Los Angeles Sheriff's Department; Christopher Solomon ; David Valentine, Sergeant, aka Valentine, Defendants–Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

833 F.3d 1060

Jonathan Michael Castro, Plaintiff–Appelle,

v.County of Los Angeles; Los Angeles Sheriff's Department; Christopher Solomon ; David Valentine, Sergeant, aka Valentine, Defendants–Appellant.

No. 12–56829

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted En Banc March 22, 2016, San Francisco, California

Filed August 15, 2016

Melinda Cantrall (argued) and Thomas C. Hurrell, Hurrell Cantrall LLP, Los Angeles, California, for Defendants–Appellants.

John Burton (argued), Law Offices of John Burton, Pasadena, California; Maria Cavalluzzi, Cavalluzzi & Cavalluzzi, Los Angeles, California; and M. Lawrence Lallande, Lallande Law PLC, Long Beach, California, for Plaintiff–Appellee.

David M. Shapiro (argued), Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago, Illinois; Paul W. Hughes, Mayer Brown LLP, Washington, D.C.; David C. Fathi, ACLU National Prison Project, Washington, D.C.; Peter Eliasberg, ACLU Foundation of Southern California, Los Angeles, California; for Amici Curiae ACLU of Southern California, American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Defense Center, National Police Accountability Project, and Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center.

Before: Sidney R. Thomas, Chief Judge, and Susan P. Graber, Ronald M. Gould, Richard A. Paez, Consuelo M. Callahan, Carlos T. Bea, Milan D. Smith, Jr., Sandra S. Ikuta, Paul J. Watford, John B. Owens, and Michelle T. Friedland, Circuit Judges.

Partial Dissent by Judge Callahan

;

Dissent by Judge Ikuta

OPINION

GRABER

, Circuit Judge:

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (“LASD”) detained Jonathan Castro in a sobering cell in the West Hollywood police station. Several hours later, authorities placed Jonathan Gonzalez, a combative inmate who had been arrested on a felony charge, in the same cell. Castro banged on the cell's window to try to attract attention. Officials at the jail ignored Castro's attempts to seek help. The County of Los Angeles and the LASD had not equipped the cell with audio monitoring, and the cell was checked only sporadically. Within hours of their co-confinement, Gonzalez severely beat and injured Castro. Castro sued individual LASD officials, the County of Los Angeles, and the LASD, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983

, for violating his due process right as a pretrial detainee to be protected from harm at the hands of other inmates. After a trial, a jury found all Defendants liable. Defendants timely appeal. We affirm.

FACTUAL¹ AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

Late in the evening of October 2, 2009, two LASD deputies arrested Castro for public drunkenness, a misdemeanor under California Penal Code section 647(f)

. Castro, the officers reported, was staggering, bumping into pedestrians, and speaking unintelligibly. The officers arrested Castro for his own safety and transported him to the West Hollywood police station. They placed him in the station's “sobering cell,” a fully walled chamber that was stripped of objects with hard edges on which an inmate could hurt himself; the cell contained only a toilet and some mattress pads.

Several hours later, authorities arrested Gonzalez on a felony charge after he shattered a glass door with his fist at a nightclub. LASD deputies described Gonzalez as acting “bizarre” at the time of his arrest. The intake form characterized Gonzalez as “combative.” The authorities placed him in the sobering cell with Castro.

The West Hollywood station manual defines a “sobering cell” as a “cell with a padded floor and standard toilet with a padded partition on one side for support. It must allow for maximum visual supervision of prisoners by staff.” The sobering cells are to be used to house inmates who are a threat to their own safety or to others' safety. The station manual provides that non-compliant sobering cells “should not be utilized.”

California's Building Code, adopted through legislative action by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors as County law, also includes standards that govern sobering cells. L.A. Cty. Code tit. 26, ch. 1, § 100 (2007). In 2009, the building code required maximum visual supervision of all inmates by staff and provided that inmates requiring more than minimum security must be housed in cells with an inmate or sound-activated audio-monitoring system. Cal. Bldg. Code tit. 24, §§ 1231.2.4, 1231.2.22 (2007). The sobering cell at the West Hollywood police station met neither of those requirements, yet it was used routinely.

Shortly after Gonzalez entered the cell, Castro approached the door and pounded on the window in the door, attempting to attract an officer's attention. No one responded. Christopher Solomon, the station's supervising officer, had assigned an unpaid community volunteer to monitor the cell. The volunteer walked by the cell about 20 minutes after Castro had sought help. He noticed that Castro appeared to be asleep and that Gonzalez was “inappropriately” touching Castro's thigh, in violation of jail policy. The volunteer did not enter the cell to investigate. Instead, he reported the contact to Solomon. Six minutes later, Solomon arrived at the sobering cell and saw Gonzalez making a violent stomping motion. He opened the door, discovered Gonzalez stomping on Castro's head, and found Castro lying unconscious in a pool of blood. Solomon separated Gonzalez from Castro and called for medical assistance.

When the paramedics arrived, Castro was unconscious, in respiratory distress, and blue. He was hospitalized for almost a month, after which he was transferred to a long-term care facility, where he remained for four years. He suffers from severe memory loss and other cognitive difficulties.

Castro filed a complaint against the County of Los Angeles and the LASD (the “entity defendants”), as well as Solomon and Solomon's supervisor, David Valentine (the “individual defendants”). He sought to recover actual damages, future damages, punitive damages, and compensation for pain and suffering. Castro claimed that both the entity defendants and the individual defendants violated his constitutional rights by housing him in the sobering cell with Gonzalez and by failing to maintain appropriate supervision of the cell.

The case proceeded to trial. After Castro presented his case, Defendants moved for judgment as a matter of law on three grounds: (1) insufficient evidence that the design of a jail cell constitutes a policy, practice, or custom by the County that resulted in a constitutional violation; (2) insufficient evidence that a reasonable officer would have known that housing Castro and Gonzalez together was a violation of Castro's constitutional rights; and (3) insufficient evidence for the jury to award punitive damages. The district court denied the motion. The jury returned a verdict for Castro on all counts and awarded him more than $2 million in damages. Defendants then filed a renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law. The district court denied the renewed motion without issuing a written opinion. Defendants timely appeal.

A three-judge panel affirmed the judgment of the district court as to the individual defendants but reversed as to the entity defendants. Castro v. County of Los Angeles , 797 F.3d 654 (9th Cir. 2015)

. A majority of active non-recused judges voted to rehear the case en banc. 809 F.3d 536 (9th Cir. 2015).

STANDARD OF REVIEW

We review de novo the district court's denial of a motion for judgment as a matter of law. Hangarter v. Provident Life & Accident Ins. Co. , 373 F.3d 998, 1005 (9th Cir. 2004)

. A renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law is properly granted only “if the evidence, construed in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party, permits only one reasonable conclusion, and that conclusion is contrary to the jury's verdict.” Pavao v. Pagay , 307 F.3d 915, 918 (9th Cir. 2002). “A jury's verdict must be upheld if it is supported by substantial evidence, which is evidence adequate to support the jury's conclusion, even if it is also possible to draw a contrary conclusion.” Id. In assessing the jury's verdict, we may not weigh the evidence but simply ask whether the plaintiff has presented sufficient evidence to support the jury's conclusion. Johnson v. Paradise Valley Unified Sch. Dist. , 251 F.3d 1222, 1227–28 (9th Cir. 2001).

DISCUSSION

We address first the claims against the individual defendants and then the claims against the entity defendants.²

A. Individual Defendants

The jury found Solomon and Valentine liable for injuries to Castro. Solomon and Valentine maintain that, as a matter of law, they are entitled to qualified immunity and that Castro has failed to show that they were deliberately indifferent to a substantial risk of serious harm.

1. Qualified Immunity

Qualified immunity shields government actors from civil liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983

if “their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Harlow v. Fitzgerald , 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). To determine whether an officer is entitled to qualified immunity, a court must evaluate two independent questions: (1) whether the officer's conduct violated a constitutional right, and (2) whether that right was clearly established at the time of the incident.

Pearson v. Callahan , 555 U.S. 223, 232, 129 S.Ct. 808, 172 L.Ed.2d 565 (2009)

.

Here, Castro—a pretrial detainee who had not been convicted of any crime—had a due process right to be free from violence from other inmates. Fifteen years before Castro's arrest, in Farmer v. Brennan , 511 U.S. 825, 833, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994)

, the Supreme Court made clear that “prison officials have a duty to protect prisoners from violence at the hands of other prisoners” because corrections officers have “stripped [the inmates] of virtually every means of self-protection and foreclosed their access to outside aid.” (Internal quotation marks and ellipsis omitted.) And the Court...