Holloway v. Lockhart
| Decision Date | 05 March 1987 |
| Docket Number | NCO-1,No. 86-1181,86-1181 |
| Citation | 813 F.2d 874 |
| Parties | , 22 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 959 Winston HOLLOWAY, Appellant, v. A.L. LOCKHART, Director; Larry Norris, Warden; Major Ray Hobbs; Assistant Warden Marvin Evans; Counselor M. Owens; Grievance Officer A.W. Williams; R. Retford; Captain Kelly; Lt. Billy Taylor;K. Johnson;Mark Jimmerson; J.L. Davis; R.F. Anderson; Kevin Murphy; Tucker Maximum Security Unit, Arkansas Department of Correction, Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit |
Blair Arnold, Balesville, Ark., for appellant.
A. Carter Hardage, Deputy Atty. Gen., Little Rock, Ark., for appellees.
Before McMILLIAN and ARNOLD, Circuit Judges, and HUNTER, * Senior District Judge.
Winston Holloway, an inmate of the Arkansas Department of Correction, brought this action under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 against various officials and employees of the Department. He claimed violations of the Eighth Amendment, as applied to the states by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The District Court granted summary judgment for defendants. Because there were genuine issues of material fact, we reverse. We also hold invalid a local rule of the District Court which, with regard to "prisoner petitions," conditions any discovery on first obtaining leave of court.
The plaintiff, Winston Holloway, is a state prison inmate in the Maximum Security Unit at Tucker, Arkansas. He filed a pro se complaint under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 against several prison guards and officials alleging that they used or approved the use of tear gas in an incident that resulted in unconstitutional injury to Holloway. Because this is an appeal from a summary judgment, we state the facts as plaintiff's evidence, together with all reasonable inferences, tended to show them. Defendants dispute a number of plaintiff's factual claims, but resolution of any such disputes, including questions of credibility, must be left to the trier of fact.
Early in the morning of October 17, 1984, two or three unarmed inmates occupied the dayroom of Tucker's isolation unit. They demanded medical attention for one of the inmates and refused to leave the dayroom until he received it. In the ensuing stand-off, the guards subdued the inmates with a barrage of tear gas sprayed from a machine called a "pepper fogger."
Meanwhile, Holloway and some 20 other inmates were asleep in their individual cells near the dayroom. The cells are connected by air vents to the dayroom. The tear gas traveled from the dayroom through the air vents to every cell in Holloway's unit. The sleeping inmates awoke in a fog of tear gas, blinded and choking. Several of them lost consciousness. The gassing continued for 10 or 15 minutes, and, afterwards, a prison nurse took an oxygen tank around the unit, giving each inmate a small amount. Although one inmate was taken to the prison infirmary after the incident, the others were not given proper medical care, despite the fact that some, including Holloway, complained of injuries and requested medical attention. The inmates were not allowed to shower in order to wash off the tear gas, nor were they permitted to change their bedding or to clean their cells.
Holloway claims use of the pepper fogger was unnecessary in the first place. If inmates in the dayroom needed to be subdued, he says, hand-held canisters of tear gas, which could not have spread so far, or other devices could have been used. In addition, he argues that the prison officials knew that gas would travel through the air vents into each prisoner's cell and that they could have closed the vents and prevented the gassing by flipping a single switch before using the pepper fogger. He also claims that the authorities deliberately provided inadequate medical care after the incident, and alleges that he passed out during the incident and had difficulty breathing for days afterward. He requested a jury trial.
The defendants moved to dismiss the complaint under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6) for failure to state a claim. In response, Holloway filed a memorandum of law and six affidavits from inmates supporting his version of events. He also moved for appointment of counsel, and, claiming that the defendants were interfering with his attempts to interview inmate witnesses, he moved for an order directing the defendants to permit him to take additional affidavits and depositions. The Court denied the motion to dismiss and, because the defendants claimed that the suit was frivolous, scheduled a non-jury hearing to determine whether a jury trial was warranted. The defendants then answered the complaint, and Holloway renewed his motion for an order directing the defendants to cooperate with discovery. The Court denied this motion because it appeared that Holloway had obtained inmate affidavits in another pending lawsuit, which contradicted his alleged inability to do so in this case. However, the Court tried to facilitate Holloway's discovery by asking him to identify any inmates whom he still could not interview and to give the Court a description of their expected testimony.
On July 30, 1985, Holloway filed a request for production of documents from the defendants under Fed.R.Civ.P. 34. On December 4, 1985, Holloway filed a motion to compel production of the documents from the defendants. In his motion to compel, Holloway claimed that the defendants had neither provided the requested documents nor objected to any of the requests.
Resisting the motion to compel, the defendants claimed that some of the documents had been provided and that others were not in their possession or were confidential. The defendants also relied on a Local Rule of the District Court, which states:
Rules of the United States District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas, Rule 23(VIII)(B). Rule 6 of the Rules Governing Section 2254 Cases provides:
Leave of court required. A party shall be entitled to invoke the processes of discovery available under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if, and to the extent that, the judge in the exercise of his discretion and for good cause shown grants leave to do so, but not otherwise.
The defendants argued that Holloway had no right to compel production of any documents without complying with the Local Rule. Holloway replied that the Local Rule was invalid because it conflicted with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure; he also claimed that the requested documents were not privileged and had not been produced. The record does not show that the District Court ever ruled on this motion before granting summary judgment, but since the motion was not granted, and at least some of the documents were never produced, we must take the District Court's action as a denial of the motion to compel.
On January 15, 1986, the defendants moved for summary judgment. They included with the motion a set of findings of fact and conclusions of law from another lawsuit, Woods v. Norris, No. PB-C-84-537 (E.D.Ark. Jan. 10, 1986), which arose from the same tear-gas incident at issue here. The plaintiffs in Woods were the inmates who had occupied the dayroom and prompted the use of tear gas, and the Court (through another District Judge) had determined that the use of tear gas was reasonable and necessary as to them and had dismissed their action. The defendants here argued that this adjudication foreclosed Holloway from relitigating the issues decided previously in Woods. Holloway argued that summary judgment was inappropriate because he had not been able to conduct effective discovery, because certain relevant facts had not been determined in Woods, and because the parties in Woods were not the same as the parties in the instant case.
On May 10, 1985, in the same order in which it denied defendants' motion to dismiss the complaint, the District Court had said:
Although plaintiff has requested a jury, a non-jury hearing will first be conducted to determine whether or not such a jury trial should be conducted.
Holloway v. Lockhart, No. PB-C-85-106 , Designated Record (D.R.) 33. This non-jury hearing took place before the District Court on January 27, 1986, and lasted about three hours. Plaintiff, whose request for counsel had been denied, appeared pro se and called eight witnesses. After he stated that his case had been "conclude[d]," Tr. 97, defendants, represented by an Assistant Attorney General, called one witness, the defendant A.L. Lockhart. Plaintiff's witnesses gave testimony which, if believed, would have established plaintiff's version of what occurred. The defendant Lockhart, who was not present during the incident and apparently had no personal knowledge of or involvement in it, testified about the pepper fogger and other ways of delivering tear gas. He stated his opinion that use of the pepper fogger was reasonable in the circumstances of this case and that plaintiff had received adequate medical care. On cross-examination, however, Lockhart appeared to confirm plaintiff's assertion that a switch could have been flipped to cut off the ventilation system, thus arguably preventing or reducing the flow of tear gas into the cells of non-combatants like the plaintiff. Tr. 107.
After defendants' testimony had been completed, Holloway complained that his request for documents had not been responded to, and asked especially for "005 forms of the incident reports made by the officers involved in this...." Tr. 113-14. Counsel for the defendants said, "I don't think I have all of them," Tr. 114, whereupon the District Court stated: "If you can find any incident...
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