Cortes-Quinones v. Jimenez-Nettleship

• Citation: 842 F.2d 556
• Decision Date: 03 November 1987
• Docket Number: P,86-2106,Nos. 86-2027,CORTES-QUINONE,JIMENEZ-NETTLESHIP,s. 86-2027
• Parties: Guillerminalaintiff, Appellee, v. Charles, etc., et al., Defendants, Appellants. . Heard
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (1st Circuit)

Page 556

842 F.2d 556

Guillermina CORTES-QUINONES, Plaintiff, Appellee, v. Charles JIMENEZ-NETTLESHIP, etc., et al., Defendants, Appellants.

Nos. 86-2027, 86-2106.

United States Court of Appeals,

First Circuit.

Heard Nov. 3, 1987.

Decided March 28, 1988.

Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc Denied April 22, 1988.

Vannessa Ramirez, Asst. Sol. Gen., Dept. of Justice, with whom Rafael Ortiz Carrion, Sol. Gen., and Norma Cotti Cruz, Deputy Sol. Gen., were on brief for defendants, appellants.

Jose E. Fernandez-Sein with whom Law Offices of Nachman & Fernandez-Sein, was on brief for plaintiff, appellee.

Before CAMPBELL, Chief Judge, BOWNES and BREYER, Circuit Judges.

BREYER, Circuit Judge.

On September 30, 1981, Puerto Rico prison officials transferred William Arenas Cortes, a psychiatrically disturbed prisoner, and thirty-nine other prisoners, from the State Penitentiary to the Arecibo District Jail, a jail so overcrowded that space per prisoner amounted to 15.5 square feet (e.g., 30 by 74 inches ). Within a matter of a few months, Arenas was found dead, his body dismembered. His mother brought this civil rights action, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 (1982), against three prison officials, claiming that their actions amounted to "cruel and unusual" punishment of her son in violation of the Eighth Amendment. After various preliminary proceedings, see Quinones v. Nettleship, 773 F.2d 10 (1st Cir.1985), a jury returned a verdict in her favor in the sum of $247,000. The court awarded her attorneys $82,000 in fees and costs. The three defendants appeal these awards. In respect to the main issues that concern liability, we find no legal error. Other, subsidiary aspects of the case, however, will require further proceedings.

I.

The basic legal standards governing this case are well established. "[P]rison officials have a duty under the 8th and 14th amendments to protect prisoners from violence at the hands of other prisoners." Leonardo v. Moran, 611 F.2d 397, 398-99 (1st Cir.1979); accord Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 526-27, 104 S.Ct. 3194, 3200-01, 82 L.Ed.2d 393 (1984); Zatler v. Wainwright, 802 F.2d 397, 400 (11th Cir.1986); Martin v. White, 742 F.2d 469, 474 (8th Cir.1984); Gates v. Collier, 501 F.2d 1291, 1309 (5th Cir.1974); Woodhous v. Virginia, 487 F.2d 889, 890 (4th Cir.1973). Those amendments also impose a duty to attend to prisoners' "serious medical needs." Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 106, 97 S.Ct. 285, 292, 50 L.Ed.2d 251 (1976); accord Layne v. Vinzant, 657 F.2d 468, 474 (1st Cir.1981); Westlake v. Lucas, 537 F.2d 857, 860 & n. 5 (6th Cir.1976); Thomas v. Pate, 493 F.2d 151, 158 (7th Cir.1974). When prison officials intentionally place prisoners in dangerous surroundings, when they intentionally ignore prisoners' serious medical needs, or when they are "deliberately indifferent" either to prisoners' health or safety, they violate the Constitution. See, e.g., Layne, supra. Different courts have described "deliberate indifference" in various ways, but, at least, that term encompasses acts or omissions so dangerous (in respect to health or safety) that a defendant's "knowledge of [a large] ... risk can be inferred." Duckworth v. Franzen, 780 F.2d 645, 652 (7th Cir.1985); compare Estelle, 429 U.S. at 104, 97 S.Ct. at 291 (inaction amounts to "deliberate indifference" if it constitutes " 'wanton infliction of pain' " (quoting Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 173, 96 S.Ct. 2909, 2925, 49 L.Ed.2d 859 (1976))) with Martin, 742 F.2d at 474 (equating "deliberate indifference" with "reckless disregard") and Layne, 657 F.2d at 474 (same). The first legal question before us is whether the record evidence is sufficient to permit a jury to find "deliberate indifference."

Defendants concede that conditions in Puerto Rico prisons in 1980-82 were appallingly bad, with severe overcrowding (a system-wide average of twenty square feet per prisoner), squalor, maltreatment, gang warfare, killings, lack of proper medical care, failure to segregate mentally disturbed prisoners, guards unable to control entire cellblocks, and other horrors catalogued in a federal district court order that found the entire system in violation of the Eighth Amendment and ordered sweeping and dramatic changes. Morales Feliciano v. Romero Barcelo, 497 F.Supp. 14 (D.P.R.1979). Defendants add, however, that they were doing their best to cope with a near impossible situation, and that plaintiff should concede (and we agree) that their decision in September 1981 to transfer 40 prisoners from the State Penitentiary to Arecibo was reasonable in light of the fact that rioting State Penitentiary prisoners had broken through a concrete prison wall, forcing officials to close a section of that prison. Defendants Torres and Nettleship also point out that they had been in office only a few months by September 1981. Where, they ask, is the evidence that each of them, as individuals, was "deliberately indifferent" to Arenas' health or safety problems, except perhaps in respect to matters beyond their control? See Pinto v. Nettleship, 737 F.2d 130, 132 (1st Cir.1984) (no Sec. 1983 liability for actions beyond a defendant's control).

Our review of the record convinces us that, even if we accept much of what defendants say, the jury still could find facts sufficient to warrant its finding of "deliberate indifference." Those facts consist of the following:

1. Arenas suffered from serious psychiatric problems. He had been diagnosed in the 1960s as a "childhood schizophrenic." In 1975, a psychiatrist wrote that "this inmate is suffering from chronic schizophrenia undifferentiated." An April 1975 prison system memo stated that Arenas needed "treatment with a psychiatrist or a psychologist." In June 1975, a prison psychologist wrote that Arenas showed "evidence of psychopathic tendencies, with possible conditions of schizophrenia" and that he warranted "psychotherapy treatment." The jury reasonably could have believed that this (or like) information was (or most certainly should have been) in Arenas's prison files.

2. Defendant Torres is Puerto Rico's Director of Penal Institutions, with special responsibility for prison security. Defendant Nettleship is Puerto Rico's Corrections Administrator. On the night of the prisoner transfers, Nettleship and Torres were at the State Penitentiary. Torres read all 40 prisoners' files and decided on the transfer. Nettleship reviewed that decision and approved the transfer order. The jury thus could have found that they knew or certainly should have known of Arenas's psychological problems.

3. Defendant Candelaria was the Superintendent of the Arecibo District Jail. On the night of the transfer, he was at the prison and screened each of the transferees for medical and psychological problems. Although he conceded that he was not trained to conduct psychiatric evaluations, he testified that "when one looks at a person one can appreciate whether or not that person needs immediate treatment." Because the transfer was under emergency conditions, the prisoners' records did not follow until five days after the transfer. When they did arrive, Candelaria, who was chairman of the treatment and classification committee, did not review them. Instead, he sent the socio-penal records to the two social penal workers and sent the medical records to the medical staff for evaluation (an evaluation not yet made at the time of Arenas's death).

4. After being shown Arenas's psychiatric records for the first time at trial, the prison doctor testified that Arenas should never have been in the general prison population. Defendants should have segregated Arenas from those prisoners without mental problems. See Morales Feliciano, 497 F.Supp. at 37-40 (ordering that prison officials segregate and provide treatment for all "psychotics" and "severely mentally ill" inmates).

5. Arenas was not segregated. Instead, he was placed with 245 other inmates in a jail that, at the 35 square feet per prisoner minimum established by the Morales-Feliciano order, 497 F.Supp. at 38-39, could house only 109. (The Joint Committee for Accreditation, whose standards serve as a guide for the federal Bureau of Prisons, requires 60 square feet per single or double celled prisoner, and 75 square feet per dormitory prisoner.) Psychiatric treatment was nonexistent at Arecibo and conditions were chaotic and violent, with the transferees, predominately members of the "Manuel Perez" prison gang, vowing to take over the jail from members of the rival Monacillo gang and to kill those who stood in their way. Arenas remained in that jail, unsegregated and without treatment for his psychological problems, for nearly four months until he was killed. During that time, Arenas's case never came before the prison classification and treatment committee, although Candelaria testified that it would have come up in "due time."

6. Had any of the defendants acted to segregate Arenas from mentally sound prisoners at Arecibo jail, he is unlikely to have been killed.

We believe that, given these facts, the jury could have found defendant Torres "deliberately indifferent" to Arenas's health and safety. The trial judge instructed the jury that "aggravated conditions" coupled with an official's failure to act could constitute "deliberate ... indifference in the sense that the official had knowledge or should have known of a pervasive risk of harm to inmates." See, e.g., Withers v. Levine, 615 F.2d 158, 161 (4th Cir.1980) (prison officials liable for injuries to inmate where there was a " 'pervasive risk of harm to inmates from other prisoners' " and officials failed to respond reasonably to that risk (quoting Woodhous v. Virginia, 487 F.2d 889, 890 (4th Cir.1973)). The judge further instructed the jury that, in determining whether this standard had been met, it could consider "whether the system of classifying inmates was adequate or inadequate, whether mentally sick inmates were exposed to risks in...