Hardeman v. Curran

• Decision Date: 12 August 2019
• Docket Number: No. 18-2672,18-2672
• Citation: 933 F.3d 816
• Parties: Tapanga HARDEMAN, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Sheriff Mark CURRAN, et al., Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

933 F.3d 816

Tapanga HARDEMAN, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees,

v.Sheriff Mark CURRAN, et al., Defendants-Appellants.

No. 18-2672

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued March 25, 2019

Decided August 12, 2019

Kevin William O'Connor, Attorney, O'Connor Law Firm, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Beth Greenberg Prager, Attorney, Stephen J. Rice, Attorney, Office of the Lake County State's Attorney, Waukegan, IL, for Defendants-Appellants.

Before Wood, Chief Judge, and Flaum and Sykes, Circuit Judges.

Wood, Chief Judge.

Water is vital for both health and sanitation. Dehydration affects practically every life function, including temperature regulation, digestion, brain function, toxin elimination, and oxygen distribution. See Jon Johnson, "Effects of having no water," MEDICAL NEWS TODAY , https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325174.php (last visited July 19, 2019). After a few days, total deprivation of water can be fatal. Id. Basic sanitation is also essential.

The plaintiffs in this case, all pretrial detainees at the Lake County Adult Correctional Facility, allege that they were forced to learn this lesson the hard way. For approximately three days in 2017, the jail officials shut off all water in their jail without any warning. With no running water, the plaintiffs had only limited water that the defendants provided for their personal and sanitation uses. As a result, they became ill and feces built up and festered in the jails’ toilets, attracting insects. When plaintiffs asked for more water, they were locked down in their cells as punishment. The pretrial detainees responded with this putative class action, in which they alleged that the defendants violated their Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. Defendants moved to dismiss on the ground of qualified immunity. The district court denied their motion, and this interlocutory appeal followed. We agree with the district court’s decision and affirm.

I

Because this case comes to us as a motion to dismiss asserting qualified immunity, we accept all well pleaded factual allegations in the complaint as true and draw all reasonable inferences in the plaintiffs’ favor. Reed v. Palmer , 906 F.3d 540, 546 (7th Cir. 2018).

Defendants Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran and Chief of Corrections David Wathen oversee the Lake County Adult Correctional Facility. (We refer to them, as well as the various yet-unnamed defendants, collectively as "Wathen.") At the time of these events, plaintiffs (all pretrial detainees) were housed there. On November 7, 2017, Wathen shut off the water at the jail. He did not forewarn any of the detainees that this shutoff was going to happen. The complaint does not reveal why Wathen shut off the water, although he avers in his briefing that he did so in order to replace a water booster pump.

During the shutoff, the detainees were not totally without water. Wathen provided them with five bottles (of indeterminate size) of water per day for their personal use. These five bottles were all that the detainees were given to drink, brush their teeth, wash their hands and faces, and take medication. When individual detainees asked for more water, they were refused. If a person repeatedly asked for more water, he was put on lockdown.

Wathen also provided a barrel of water (again, of unclear size) to each communal area, called a pod, within the jail. The barrel of water in each pod was to be used for bathing, cleaning the pod’s cells, and flushing toilets within the cells. But not all flushing: the detainees were instructed to flush only when feces were present. They were forbidden to flush at all during the night.

Unfortunately, these arrangements for flushing were a failure, in that they often did not clear the toilets. This led to feces and urine sitting in toilets throughout the jail for prolonged periods of time. This was no small issue, as the jail has a capacity of approximately 740 inmates. There were thus hundreds of toilets holding feces and urine. Unsurprisingly, the continuous presence of excrement produced a powerful and putrid smell. Insects were also attracted to the unflushed feces.

The plaintiffs and other detainees say that these conditions were disgusting and caused them tangible harm. They allege that they became "sick, sleep deprived, and agitated" because of the continuous presence of excrement in their cells; that they were not provided with enough water to take needed medications; and that the lack of drinking water and unsanitary conditions caused numerous ailments, including "dehydration, migraine headaches, sickness, dizziness, constipation, and general malaise." Three days later, on November 10, 2017, the water shutoff ended.

II

Because this appeal comes to us after a denial of qualified immunity, we must answer two questions: first, whether the constitutional right asserted by the plaintiffs was clearly established at the time the defendants acted; and second, whether defendants’ actions violated that clearly established right. Reed , 906 F.3d at 546. " ‘If either inquiry is answered in the negative, the defendant official’ is protected by qualified immunity." Id. (quoting Green v. Newport , 868 F.3d 629, 633 (7th Cir. 2017) ). Our review is de novo . Id.

When attempting to defeat an assertion of qualified immunity, the burden is on the plaintiffs to show that a particular right is "clearly established." To meet that burden, a plaintiff’s asserted right must be defined "at the appropriate level of specificity." Wilson v. Layne , 526 U.S. 603, 615, 119 S.Ct. 1692, 143 L.Ed.2d 818 (1999). "The Supreme Court has ‘repeatedly told lower courts ... not to define clearly established law at a high level of generality.’ " Reed , 906 F.3d at 548 (quoting Volkman v. Ryker , 736 F.3d 1084, 1090 (7th Cir. 2013) (alteration in original)). An appropriately defined right is clearly established if there is a closely analogous—though not necessarily identical—case identifying that right, or if "the defendant’s conduct was ‘so egregious and unreasonable that ... no reasonable [official] could have thought he was acting lawfully.’ " Id. (alteration in original) (quoting Abbott v. Sangamon Cnty. , 705 F.3d 706, 724 (7th Cir. 2013) ). "The dispositive question ‘is whether the violative nature of particular conduct is clearly established.’ " Mullenix v. Luna , ––– U.S. ––––, 136 S. Ct. 305, 308, 193 L.Ed.2d 255 (2015) (quoting Ashcroft v. al-Kidd , 563 U.S. 731, 742, 131 S.Ct. 2074, 179 L.Ed.2d 1149 (2011) ).

A

Plaintiffs here focus on two conditions that they allege violated their clearly established rights: the denial of the minimal amount of water needed for necessary activities of life, and the deprivation of the basic sanitary measure of preventing the build-up of feces, which forced plaintiffs to be surrounded by their own and others’ excrement. Both of these claims describe conditions of confinement that courts have long recognized as potential constitutional violations. It has been clearly established for decades that prisons must provide inmates with "the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities." Rhodes v. Chapman , 452 U.S. 337, 347, 101 S.Ct. 2392, 69 L.Ed.2d 59 (1981). We have interpreted this general statement as a requirement that prisons provide inmates with "reasonably adequate ventilation, sanitation, bedding, hygienic materials, and utilities." Gray v. Hardy , 826 F.3d 1000, 1005 (7th Cir. 2016) (quoting Lewis v. Lane , 816 F.2d 1165, 1171 (7th Cir. 1987) ); see also Woods v. Thieret , 903 F.2d 1080, 1082 (7th Cir. 1990) ("Clearly, prison officials have a responsibility to provide inmates with a minima of food, shelter and basic necessities.").

Wathen argues that despite the generally well-established nature of these rights, the circumstances of this case—a non-total deprivation caused by a three-day planned water shutdown—take us into novel territory. But what is so new about it? All but the most plainly incompetent jail officials would be aware that it is constitutionally unacceptable to fail to provide inmates with enough water for consumption and sanitation over a three-day period. Perhaps an official would be excused for miscalculating the amount of water needed ex ante , so long as he worked to fix the problem once it manifested. But that is not the case before us. According to plaintiffs’ allegations, Wathen provided a limited amount of water, he and his staff were quickly made aware that more water was needed both for consumption and for sanitation, and they failed to provide any additional water. Indeed, plaintiffs allege that Wathen punished them for continued water requests.

The conditions that plaintiffs depict are very similar to those we have seen in previous cases, in both duration and severity. In Woods v. Thieret , we stated that an allegation of three days without food (more specifically, one full day without food, sandwiched between days without dinner or break-fast) stated a claim for a violation of the Eighth Amendment. 903 F.2d at 1082. In Johnson v. Pelker , 891 F.2d 136 (7th Cir. 1989), we reversed a grant of summary judgment for the defendants because "placing a prisoner in a cell for three days without running water and in which feces are smeared on the walls while ignoring his requests for cleaning supplies" could violate the Eighth Amendment. Id. at 139. Similarly, a number of our sister circuits have recognized that days-long deprivations of water and continued exposure to human excrement can violate the Eighth Amendment. See DeSpain v. Uphoff , 264 F.3d 965, 974–75 (10th Cir. 2001) (stating that "[e]xposure to human waste, like few other conditions of confinement, evokes both the health concerns emphasized in Farmer [v. Brennan , 511 U.S. 825, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994),] and the more general standards of dignity embodied in the Eighth Amendment," and collecting cases with similar holdings from the Second, Fifth, Seventh, and Eighth Circuits dating back to 1972); Dellis...