Hughes v. Judd

• Decision Date: 16 April 2015
• Docket Number: Case No. 8:12–cv–568–T–23MAP.
• Citation: 108 F.Supp.3d 1167
• Parties: Chanda HUGHES, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Grady JUDD, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Middle District of Florida

108 F.Supp.3d 1167

Chanda HUGHES, et al., Plaintiffs,

v.Grady JUDD, et al., Defendants.

Case No. 8:12–cv–568–T–23MAP.

United States District Court, M.D. Florida, Tampa Division.

Signed April 16, 2015.

Donald J. Hayden, Berger Singerman, LLP, Miami, FL, Joseph Peter Rindone, Baker & McKenzie, LLP, New York, NY, Maria V. Morris, Montgomery, AL, Miriam Fahsi Haskell, Tania Galloni, Miami, FL, Steven M. Chasin, Baker & McKenzie, LLP, Washington, DC, Jody E. Owens, II, Jackson, MS, Manoj Gorantla Govindaiah, Raices, San Antonio, TX, for Plaintiffs.

Hank B. Campbell, Jonathan Barnet Trohn, Robert J. Aranda, Jennifer Megan Vasquez, Valenti, Campbell, Trohn, Tamayo & Aranda, PA, Lakeland, FL, William Thompson McKinley, William McKinley Law, P.A., Bartow, FL, Jeanelle G. Bronson, Patrick H. Telan, Ramon Vazquez, Jennifer L. Phillips, Philip J. Wallace, Grower, Ketcham, Rutherford, Bronson, Eide & Telan, PA, Orlando, FL, for Defendants.

CONCLUSIONS OF LAW AND FINDINGS OF FACT

STEVEN D. MERRYDAY, District Judge.

[U]nder the Constitution, the first question to be answered is not whose plan is best, but in what branch of the Government is lodged the authority to initially devise the plan. This does not mean that constitutional rights are not to be scrupulously observed. It does mean, however, that the inquiry of federal courts into prison management must be limited to the issue of whether a particular system violates any prohibition of the Constitution....

Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 562, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979).

This is an action by several juveniles, as representatives of other juveniles similarly situated, asserting that Grady Judd, in his capacity as Sheriff of Polk County, Florida, and Corizon Health, Inc., a health care provider retained by the Sheriff, violated the juveniles' rights under the Fourteenth Amendment during the juveniles' detention at the Central County Jail (CCJ) in Bartow, Polk County, Florida. The action began in March 2012 with a complaint (Doc. 1), an amended complaint (Doc. 3) a few days later, and a simultaneous motion for preliminary Case 8 injunction, which was denied after an evidentiary hearing before the magistrate judge (Docs. 332 and 364).

The bench trial of this action began on November 18, 2013, and concluded on December 18, 2013. The action was tried on the five counts appearing in the third amended complaint (Doc. 197). Each count alleges a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Count I alleges a constitutional violation based on the Sheriff's allegedly failing to provide the juveniles in detention with "rehabilitative services." Count II alleges a constitutional violation based on the Sheriff's alleged failure to protect the plaintiffs from harm, the Sheriff's alleged application to the plaintiffs of "unlawful force," the Sheriff's alleged subjection of the plaintiffs to "unreasonable restraints," and the Sheriff's alleged creation of "dangerously violent conditions of confinement." Count III alleges a constitutional violation based on the Sheriff's alleged placement of juveniles on "suicide watch" into "punitive isolation without penological justification" and based on the Sheriff's alleged "deliberate indifference" to the "mental health needs" of juveniles in detention. Count IV alleges a constitutional violation based on the Sheriff's and Corizon's alleged failure to provide the plaintiffs "necessary mental health treatment," the alleged subjection of the plaintiffs to "punitive, harmful conditions of confinement," and the alleged "deliberate indifference to serious medical needs." Count V alleges a constitutional violation based on the Sheriff's and Corizon's subjection of the plaintiffs to isolation in a disproportionately punitive manner with "deliberate indifference." The third amended complaint concludes with a demand for class certification, for a declaration of the unconstitutionality of the defendants' conduct, for temporary and permanent injunctive relief, and for an award of an attorney's fee and statutory costs. In the order recommending denial of the preliminary injunction, the magistrate judge recommended certifying a "primary class" for all counts of the complaint, a sub-class for Count I, and a sub-class for Count II. With modifications, the district judge certified the recommended primary class and the two sub-classes (Docs. 364 and 500).

Each claim in the complaint asserts a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The complaint includes no state constitutional claim, no federal or state statutory claim, and no state law tort claim. The plaintiffs present five federal constitutional claims, each governed solely by the federal constitutional standards that govern a claim under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Therefore, in the concluding minutes of the month-long bench trial in this action and with an acute awareness that the parties harbored distinctly different and probably irreconcilable understandings of the constitutional standard governing the disposition of the plaintiffs' five claims under the Fourteenth Amendment, the parties were directed to explain in their post-trial proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law precisely their respective understanding of the governing constitutional standard:

I need you to tell me exactly ... each applicable constitutional standard that ... has been violated or infringed ... by a defendant. And I need you to identify ... the accepted means or method or test to ascertain compliance with that standard. In other words, articulate the standard and articulate the test. And I would urge you to include your strongest citations of authority to support those standards.

SOME PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

The parties submitted lengthy proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, in sum comprising more than 450 pages, divided more or less evenly between the plaintiffs and the two defendants. This order begins with an evaluation of the plaintiffs' proposed findings of law, which consume only twenty pages in the plaintiffs' initial proposed findings but which require an analysis of nearly ninety pages in this order (the reply contains a few miscellaneous citations but the content fails to warrant extending this already brutally lengthy paper).

In general, although acceptance of the plaintiffs' proposed constitutional standard is essential to the plausibility of the plaintiffs' claims, the plaintiffs' proposed legal standards are decidedly and demonstrably not the law of the land and constitute an aggressive and novel undertaking to insert the federal judiciary forcefully into the administration of a county's juvenile detention in a manner and to an extent without warrant, without precedent, and without bounds. The plaintiffs offer in defense of this proposed intervention both a flawed interpretation of the pertinent precedent and a nearly uniform reliance on decisions that are either not binding, not applicable, not persuasive, or not—for example, in the citation as authority of a settlement—precedent at all. Although the law of the Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit is plentiful, accessible, and precisely governing, the plaintiffs largely choose to look elsewhere for guidance.

The discussion of the plaintiffs' view of the law is followed in this order by a discussion of the Sheriff's and Corizon's view of the law. The plaintiffs' view of the law is generally wrong, and the defendants' view is generally right. This order's discussion of the law exceeds a hundred pages but serves to vividly detail the basis for the conclusion offered in the preceding sentence and serves to illustrate unmistakably the circumstances—the history, the particulars, the tangibles—in which and to which the Fourteenth Amendment requires remedial action by the judiciary. Stated differently, the following discussion includes an illustrative summary of the facts in many of the cases discussed, and these summaries serve to exemplify correctly the circumstances that trigger (or not) the force of the Fourteenth Amendment. To encapsulate the conclusion of this order, the circumstances at CCJ are comfortably and distinctly outside the circumstances that implicate the Fourteenth Amendment.

* * *

After the extended discussion of the law, this order includes an extended finding of fact, including findings pertinent to the "expert" testimony received at trial. Again, in general, this order finds facts consistent with the defendants' proposed findings and inconsistent with the plaintiffs' proposed findings.

However, in one sense, a resolution of many of the conflicts between the proposed findings of fact is unnecessary because, once the proper constitutional standard is understood and the facts necessary to prompt remedial action by the judiciary under the Fourteenth Amendment are properly appreciated, the insufficiency of the plaintiffs' presentation—although lengthy and tenacious and inclusive of every arguable episode, great and small—becomes manifest and dispositive. In fact, the conditions of juvenile detention at CCJ are not consistent with the plaintiffs' dark, grim, and condemning portrayal.

* * *

The plaintiffs insist that the level of fighting in juvenile detention at CCJ, say, two "fights" per week, is unconstitutional. But even after immense and determined discovery, litigation assistance by "experts," and weeks of trial, the plaintiffs' characterization of the level of violence at CCJ remains wholly impressionistic because the plaintiffs offered no data from comparable facilities. For all that the evidence in this action proves, the two "fights" per week among eighty to a hundred teenage detainees living in close quarters at CCJ might constitute a historic high or a historic low. From the record, one cannot know; the omission by the plaintiffs is purposeful.

The plaintiffs' failure to adduce comparable data is curious, indeed. If comparable data exists, a purposeful failure to introduce the data is most suggestive. If the data is non-existent, the plaintiffs'...