Gunther v. Castineta
| Decision Date | 02 April 2014 |
| Docket Number | No. 11-3627,11-3627 |
| Parties | KEITH E. GUNTHER, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. ED CASTINETA, et al., Defendants-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
NOT RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION
File Name: 14a0251n.06
ON APPEAL FROM
THE UNITED STATES
DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE SOUTHERN
DISTRICT OF OHIO
Before: BOGGS, CLAY, and GILMAN, Circuit Judges.
BOGGS, Circuit Judge. Plaintiff-Appellant Keith Gunther, an inmate at the Marion Correctional Institution, brought this prisoner civil-rights action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging numerous rights violations on the part of fourteen defendants, including six corrections officers and eight medical professionals (collectively, "defendants"). The district court adopted the report and recommendation of the magistrate judge in this matter and dismissed Gunther's complaint for failure to state a claim. Gunther appeals the dismissal and argues that he adequately pleaded three claims: two claims of deliberate indifference to his medical needs on the part of "[t]he medical staff, particularly Dr. Ojubwii," and one claim of the use of excessive force by "correction[s] officer Lucal," all in violation of Gunther's Eighth Amendment rights. Pl.'s Br. at 3-4. For the reasons that follow, we affirm the district court's dismissal with respectto Gunther's deliberate-indifference claims but reverse and remand with respect to Gunther's excessive-force claim.
We review de novo a district court's decision to dismiss an inmate's complaint, under 28 U.S.C. § 1915A, for failure to state a claim. Grinter v. Knight, 532 F.3d 567, 571 (6th Cir. 2008). The Prison Litigation Reform Act ("PLRA") requires district courts to screen and dismiss, inter alia, complaints that fail to state a claim upon which relief may be granted. Id. at 572 (citing 28 U.S.C. § 1915A(b)). "In reviewing a dismissal of a complaint for failure to state a claim, we must construe the complaint in the light most favorable to the plaintiff and accept all well-pleaded factual allegations as true." Bennett v. McBride, 67 F. App'x 850, 853 (6th Cir. 2003) (citations omitted).
Pro se complaints are to be held to less stringent standards than formal pleadings drafted by lawyers, and should therefore be liberally construed. Williams v. Curtin, 631 F.3d 380, 383 (6th Cir. 2011) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). Nevertheless, we apply the "plausibility" standard set out in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009), in screening inmate complaints under 28 U.S.C. § 1915A. Hill v. Lappin, 630 F.3d 468, 470-71 (6th Cir. 2010). Under that standard, a plaintiff's allegations must be sufficient to enable the court "to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged." Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 678.
As a preliminary matter, we address the defendants' argument that, in construing Gunther's allegations for purposes of reviewing the district court's order, we should consider only the allegations contained in his initial complaint; that is, we should not consider anyallegations contained in Gunther's objections to the magistrate judge's report. Defs.' Br. at 11. The defendants argue that such objections are effectively an amendment to the complaint, and that such an amendment is barred by binding precedent in this circuit, including Baxter v. Rose, 305 F.3d 486, 489 (6th Cir. 2002) and McGore v. Wrigglesworth, 114 F.3d 601, 612 (6th Cir. 1997).
To the extent that the cases that the defendants cite support their argument, those cases have been overruled. In LaFountain, we held that "a district court can allow a plaintiff to amend his complaint even when the complaint is subject to dismissal under the PLRA." LaFountain v. Harry, 716 F.3d 944, 951 (6th Cir. 2013). In so doing, we explicitly overruled our contrary holding in McGore, on the ground that the Supreme Court had made clear that "the PLRA's screening requirement does not—explicitly or implicitly—justify deviating from the usual procedural practice beyond the departures specified by the PLRA itself." LaFountain, 716 F.3d at 951 (citing Jones v. Bock, 549 U.S. 199, 214 (2007)). Accordingly, the district court did not abuse its discretion in considering the allegations made in Gunther's objections as well as those in his complaint, and we accord them due consideration in reviewing Gunther's appeal.
We turn to Gunther's two deliberate-indifference claims. Gunther claims that "prison officials," including a Dr. Ojubwii and his staff, were "deliberately indifferent" to Gunther's back pain (claim one) and mental illness (claim two), in violation of the Eighth Amendment. To prove a violation of the Eighth Amendment based on deliberate indifference, a plaintiff must prove both that, objectively, he had "a serious medical need," and that, subjectively, the defendant or defendants had "a sufficiently culpable state of mind" with respect to his condition. Johnson v. Karnes, 398 F.3d 868, 874 (6th Cir. 2005).
Gunther must first prove that he had a "serious medical need." "A serious medical need is one that has been diagnosed by a physician as mandating treatment or one that is so obvious that even a lay person would easily recognize the necessity for a doctor's attention." Harrison v. Ash, 539 F.3d 510, 518 (6th Cir. 2008) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). Whether a medical need is "obvious" does not depend on whether it was in fact obvious to anyone at the time; that issue goes to the subjective, rather than the objective, component of deliberate indifference. Rather, the question is whether the average person would easily recognize—whether from observing the person or being told of his symptoms—that the plaintiff's condition needed treatment.
The case law is unclear as to what must be "obvious" about a medical need for it to be considered serious. Some cases have implied that a medical need is obvious to a layperson only if the layperson could easily detect it. These cases, however, typically do not distinguish the objective and subjective components of a deliberate-indifference claim, effectively combining them into one inquiry. See, e.g., Alexander v. Jones, 234 F.3d 1267 (6th Cir. 2000) (); Gaudreault v. Mun. of Salem, Mass., 923 F.2d 203, 208 (1st Cir. 1990) (). Other cases have implied that a need is obvious if the average person would surely deem it to be one that required treatment, regardless of whether such a person could easily detect it. For example, in Karnes, this court found that the plaintiff's need was sufficiently obvious because "[h]is medical request forms stated that his tendons were completely severed—a condition that almost any lay person would realize to be serious." Karnes, 398 F.3d at 874. We found that a seriousmedical need was present because a severed tendon, though not necessarily obvious to the naked eye, is generally considered a serious condition.
We think the latter view is the better approach to determining whether a medical need is objectively serious: a medical need is serious if the average person would surely deem it to be one that required professional treatment. This view makes sense because the alternative— obviousness in the sense of visibility—speaks more directly to subjective awareness than to objective seriousness. It also makes sense because a condition that appears serious to a layperson observing it may in fact be harmless, and a condition that appears harmless may in fact be serious. Therefore, we will gauge seriousness based on how the layperson would likely react to the relevant facts, not on his ability to discover those facts.
If a plaintiff can demonstrate a serious medical need, he must then prove that the defendants had a "sufficiently culpable state of mind" with respect to that need. A sufficiently culpable state of mind exists where "the official in question subjectively perceived a risk of harm and then disregarded it." Karnes, 398 F.3d at 875 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). In particular, "a plaintiff alleging deliberate indifference must show more than negligence or the misdiagnosis of an ailment." Id. Accordingly, "when a prison doctor provides treatment, albeit carelessly or inefficaciously, to a prisoner, he has not displayed a deliberate indifference to the prisoner's needs, but merely a degree of incompetence which does not rise to the level of a constitutional violation." Id. (citations and internal alteration marks omitted). To exhibit deliberate indifference, "the official must both be aware of the facts from which the inference could be drawn that a substantial risk of harm exists, and he must also draw the inference." Harrison, 539 F.3d at 518. "We may infer the existence of this subjective state of mind from the fact that the risk of harm is obvious." Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730, 738 (2002).
Gunther first argues on appeal that he adequately pleaded a claim of deliberate indifference with respect to his back pain. The first question is whether Gunther's back pain constituted "a serious medical need." Gunther can arguably show that his back pain was a medical need that was "diagnosed by a physician as mandating treatment," since he appears to have required spinal surgery in 2003 and the doctors who eventually evaluated him again in 2008 allegedly said that he had "swelling around [his] lubar [sic] #4 and #5" and prescribed him additional pain medication—including "ultrium, neurontin, and flexeril"—to address it. Since Gunther's allegations indicate that his back pain was "diagnosed by a physician as mandating treatment," we find that he adequately alleged a "serious medical need."
We arrive at the same conclusion on the ground...
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