Lachance v. Town of Charlton, 20-1103

• Citation: 990 F.3d 14
• Decision Date: 03 March 2021
• Docket Number: No. 20-1103,20-1103
• Parties: Michael E. LACHANCE, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. TOWN OF CHARLTON; Officer Jason F. White; Officer Timothy A. Smith; Sgt. Keith R. Cloutier, Defendants, Appellees.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (1st Circuit)

990 F.3d 14

Michael E. LACHANCE, Plaintiff, Appellant,

v.TOWN OF CHARLTON; Officer Jason F. White; Officer Timothy A. Smith; Sgt. Keith R. Cloutier, Defendants, Appellees.

No. 20-1103

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

March 3, 2021

Héctor E. Piñeiro, Worcester, MA, with whom Robert A. Scott, Lizabel M. Negrón-Vargas, Guaynabo, PR, and Law Office of Héctor Piñeiro were on brief, for appellant.

Bradford N. Louison, Boston, MA, with whom Douglas I. Louison, Boston, MA, and Louison, Costello, Condon & Pfaff, LLP were on brief, for appellees.

Before Howard, Chief Judge, Thompson, Circuit Judge, and Katzmann, Judge.^*

HOWARD, Chief Judge.

Michael Lachance ("Lachance") woke up at night gasping for air. His wife called 911, and three police officers responded. Lachance did not appear to be of sound mind. While attempting to restrain him, two officers ended up pushing Lachance onto a sofa-recliner (the "push"), which toppled over, then one of the officers kneeled on his back (the "kneel"). Lachance sued the officers, Sgt. Keith Cloutier, Officer Timothy Smith, and Officer Jason White, and their employer, the Town of Charlton, Massachusetts ("defendants"). The district court found at summary judgment that the push and the kneel constituted two discrete uses of force and granted summary judgment to the defendants as to the push on the basis of qualified immunity. After a jury trial, the court entered a directed verdict for the defendants on the remaining counts on the ground that Lachance failed to prove that any injury he suffered was caused by the kneel. We affirm in part and vacate in part.

I.

A.

In the middle of the night on January 4, 2014, Kimberley Lachance awoke to her bed shaking and a gurgling sound.¹ She noticed her husband, Lachance, convulsing, gasping for air, and foaming at the mouth beside her. Mrs. Lachance attempted to supply him with his inhaler, but he rolled off the bed, landing face-down onto the floor. Somewhere along the way, Lachance bit his tongue and started bleeding from his mouth. When Mrs. Lachance noticed that he had urinated on himself and his complexion was turning blue, she called 911.

Officer Smith responded to the call and attempted to assess Lachance and supply him with oxygen, but Lachance got up and started stumbling down the hallway, pressing his hands against the walls for support and wearing only his underpants. By this time, Sgt. Cloutier and Officer White as well as two EMTs had arrived. All three police officers were aware that Lachance was experiencing some sort of medical emergency, but no one present at that time had deduced what was causing his symptoms. Lachance pushed past the EMTs who were in his way, ignoring their questions about his condition and their requests that he stop moving and repeatedly asking, "What did I do?"

Officers Smith and White officers flanked Lachance, each holding one of his arms, and repeatedly told him to stop walking. But Lachance continued walking, attempting to pull away from the officers and repeatedly asking what he did. He began to "wobbl[e]" and "stumble[ ]" his way toward the open kitchen door leading to a steep, icy stairway outside the second-story apartment, but the officers redirected him toward a cloth La-Z-Boy recliner in the adjacent living room.

According to Mrs. Lachance, the two officers then pushed Lachance onto the sofa-recliner "with a lot of force"; he landed in a seated position; the recliner tumbled over backward along with Lachance and the officers, one of whom landed on top of Lachance; and Lachance landed with his back on the recliner, still in a seated position. Lachance's son Amahd, who witnessed the encounter from his bedroom doorway, described the force used as "a push, grab, follow through." He described his father's fall onto the recliner as a "hard landing," "not the way that you would want to sit in it" but rather "more like he fell on the top of it." Amahd further described Lachance's subsequent fall onto the floor as another "hard landing" on his "back side-ish" and "shoulder blade" area, his body "laying on the ground" with the upper half on the kitchen's tile floor and the lower half on the living room's hardwood floor.

"Immediately" after his fall, the officers "swarmed" Lachance. Officers Smith and White got up, grabbed one of Lachance's arms each, and dragged him off the recliner and onto the kitchen floor behind it. Lachance began flailing his arms and kicking his legs, screaming for his mother, and asking what he did wrong. The three officers forcibly rolled Lachance onto his stomach. Sgt. Cloutier and Officer White moved next to his upper body, and Officer Smith straddled his legs. Lachance kept trying to get up, so one of the officers kneeled down with one knee on the center of his back to keep him down. Officer White placed a pillow under Lachance's head to stop him from banging it on the floor, Officer Smith put his legs in a figure-four leglock, and some combination of the officers pulled his arms behind his back and attempted to place handcuffs on him. While Lachance was on the floor, Mrs. Lachance noticed bruising on his back, and Amahd heard someone yell that he was seizing.

The on-the-floor scuffle between Lachance and the officers was over in a matter of seconds. Sgt. Cloutier and Officer Smith ended up placing one set of handcuffs on one of Lachance's hands and one on the other and then connecting the two. EMTs brought a stretcher into the room, rolled Lachance onto it, then strapped him in. Lachance was transported to the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Throughout the twenty-minute ambulance ride, he was kicking and thrashing about, so much so that he cut his wrists

open. When Amahd arrived at the hospital to visit his father, he noticed deep cuts on his father's wrists and bruising all over his back, ribs, and shoulders. Lachance was diagnosed with cluster seizures and a T4-T5 compression fracture. He suffered back pain for over a year after the incident.

B.

At trial, Amahd testified that the kneel was to the center of Lachance's back, and Mrs. Lachance specified that the kneel was to the center of Lachance's upper back.² Mrs. Lachance further testified that the kneel lasted no more than thirty seconds.

Lachance's medical expert, Alexander Chirkov, MD, opined to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that Lachance's T4-T5 compression fracture

was caused by him being pushed onto the recliner and not from any subsequent kneeling. In a transparent but confusing effort to illustrate why he reached that conclusion, he testified about a photograph of a bruise on the left side of Lachance's back and indicated that when one considers the "direction" "[o]f the force when the person lay[s] down on the ground," it would have been "impossible to generate ... [enough] compression to smash the vertebrae." Dr. Chirkov did, however, note that while any kneeling on the T4-T5 discs was "not ... going to accelerate the fracture," it "can make the problem worse" by causing "more compression of the nerves" and therefore "more pain."

Dr. Chirkov testified about a number of other photographs documenting Lachance's injuries. In relevant part, Dr. Chirkov testified about a photograph of Lachance's upper back, indicating two bruises and attributing them to "pressure on his back, physical compression" of the sort "usually ... see[n] ... on restrained people." He further testified about a photograph showing a brown bruise on Lachance's midline, which was "consistent with a compression mark" and "[a] restrained position." In the end, he clarified that he found no injuries that Lachance suffered other than the T4-T5 compression fracture

to be "of significance."

C.

Lachance filed a complaint in the District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleging excessive force pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Count I), assault and battery (Count II), a claim under Monell v. Dep't of Soc. Servs. of City of New York, 436 U.S. 658, 98 S.Ct. 2018, 56 L.Ed.2d 611 (1978), against the Town of Charlton (Count III), negligence (Count IV), and violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA"), 42 U.S.C. § 12131 (Count V).

The defendants moved for summary judgment pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56. The district court granted the defendants' motion as to the excessive force claim insofar as it was premised on the push, as well as the ADA claim, but it denied summary judgment on the remaining counts and expressed its intention to bifurcate trial of the Monell claim from trial of the other claims. The case proceeded to trial by jury on what remained of the excessive force claim as well as the state law assault and battery and negligence claims. At the close of trial, the defendants moved for judgment as a matter of law pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50(a) on those three claims. The court granted the motion as to all remaining claims, including the Monell claim for which the defendants had not moved for judgment as a matter of law, and entered a directed verdict for the defendants.

This timely appeal followed. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291.

II.

On appeal, Lachance challenges the district court's orders: (1) granting the defendants' motion for summary judgment on the excessive force claim as to the push; and (2) granting the defendants' motion for judgment as a matter of law on the remaining four counts.³ We address each challenge in turn.

A.

We review a district court's grant of summary judgment de novo, reading the facts in the light most favorable to the non-moving party and granting all reasonable inferences in his favor. See Irish v. Fowler, 979 F.3d 65, 73 (1st Cir. 2020).

Qualified immunity is a doctrine that shields government officials from individual-capacity suits for damages under § 1983 "when [they] ma[de] a decision that, even if constitutionally deficient, reasonably misapprehend[ed] the law governing the circumstances [they] confronted." Taylor v. Riojas, ––– U.S. ––––,...