Poindexter v. D.C. Dep't of Corr.

• Decision Date: 19 September 2012
• Docket Number: Civil Case No. 08–1883 (RJL).
• Citation: 891 F.Supp.2d 117
• Parties: Joseph E. POINDEXTER, Plaintiff, v. D.C. DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Columbia

891 F.Supp.2d 117

Joseph E. POINDEXTER, Plaintiff,

v.D.C. DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, et al., Defendants.

Civil Case No. 08–1883 (RJL).

United States District Court, District of Columbia.

Sept. 19, 2012.

James H. Hulme, Arent Fox LLP, Washington, DC, for Plaintiff.

Alexander Francuzenko, Cook, Craig & Francuzenko, PLLC, Fairfax, VA, for Defendants.

MEMORANDUM OPINION

RICHARD J. LEON, District Judge.

Plaintiff Joseph Poindexter (“plaintiff” or “Poindexter”) brings this action against two groups of defendants: (1) Pamunkey Regional Jail Authority (“PRJA”) and its employees, Superintendent James Willett, Corrections Officer Mark A. Claveau, Corrections Officer Kimberly D. Hopkins, Corrections Officer Thomas L. Eckert, and Grievance Corrections Officer Eugene G. Emelianov (collectively, “Virginia defendants”), in their official capacities; and (2) the District of Columbia (the “District”). Plaintiff seeks declaratory and injunctive relief, in addition to compensatory and punitive damages, for violations of his constitutional rights arising out of plaintiff's imprisonment at the District and Pamunkey Regional Jails. Before the Court is the District's Motion to Dismiss or, in the Alternative, for Summary Judgment (Dkt. # 74). Upon consideration of the parties' pleadings, relevant law, and the entire record herein, the District's Motion to Dismiss is GRANTED.

BACKGROUND

Plaintiff Joseph Poindexter has been a District of Columbia inmate since August 2005. Second Am. Compl. (“Compl.”) ¶¶ 20–21, ECF No. 71. On March 17, 2008, however, plaintiff was transferred to and temporarily detained at the Pamunkey Regional Jail (“Pamunkey”) in Hanover, Virginia pursuant to an agreement between the District and Pamunkey regarding the housing of District inmates. Id. ¶¶ 7, 22.

Upon becoming a District of Columbia inmate in 2005, plaintiff asserts that the District registered him under the incorrect last name of “Leaks” ¹ and refused to change its records to reflect his legal surname despite his insistence. Id. ¶¶ 30–35. As a result, plaintiff alleges that he was deprived of correspondence from his attorney in violation of his First Amendment right to access the courts. Id. ¶¶ 36–37, 53. After he was transferred to and temporarily detained at Pamunkey, the plaintiff contends that the District continued to deprive him of his rights under the Constitution. More specifically, plaintiff alleges that the District violated his Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights by failing to remedy Pamunkey's allegedly deficient law library despite his complaints and, through the actions of the Virginia defendants, placing him in segregation without notice or a hearing and denying him blood pressure medication, among other things. See id. ¶¶ 38–79.

On December 8, 2011, the District moved to dismiss this suit, or in the alternative, for summary judgment. See generally District's Mot. to Dismiss or, in the Alt., for Summ. J. (“Dist.'s Mot.”), ECF No. 74. For the following reasons, the District's Motion to Dismiss is GRANTED.

LEGAL STANDARD

The District moves to dismiss the complaint pursuant to Rule 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure on the ground that it fails to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. In evaluating the District's Motion to Dismiss, the Court must “treat the complaint's factual allegations as true” and “grant plaintiff the benefit of all inferences that can be derived from the facts alleged.” Sparrow v. United Air Lines, Inc., 216 F.3d 1111, 1113 (D.C.Cir.2000) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).

“While a complaint attacked by a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss does not need detailed factual allegations, a plaintiff's obligation to provide the grounds of his entitle[ment] to relief requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do.” Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007) (alteration in original) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Rather, the complaint “must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.” Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 173 L.Ed.2d 868 (2009) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). “[T]he court need not accept inferences drawn by plaintiff[ ] if such inferences are unsupported by the facts set out in the complaint.”Kowal v. MCI Commc'ns Corp., 16 F.3d 1271, 1276 (D.C.Cir.1994). Indeed, where the court cannot infer more than the mere possibility of misconduct from the facts, “the complaint has alleged—but it has not shown—that the pleader is entitled to relief.” Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 679, 129 S.Ct. 1937 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).

ANALYSIS

I. Municipal Liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983

Petitioner brings this suit against the District and its “agents, assistants or employees,” seeking to hold the municipality liable under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for alleged violations of his First, Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.²

To state a claim against a municipality under § 1983, however, a plaintiff must plead facts sufficient to allege that: (1) he was deprived of a constitutional or federal right; and (2) such deprivation was the result of a government policy or custom. Warren v. Dist. of Columbia, 353 F.3d 36, 38 (D.C.Cir.2004). This second requirement not only rebuffs a respondeat superior theory of liability, which would hold a municipality accountable for the torts of its employees, but it also limits the liability of a municipality to its own unlawful conduct, i.e., action taken pursuant to official municipal policy. See Monell v. Dep't of Soc. Servs., 436 U.S. 658, 690–91, 98 S.Ct. 2018, 56 L.Ed.2d 611 (1978); Connick v. Thompson, ––– U.S. ––––, 131 S.Ct. 1350, 1359, 179 L.Ed.2d 417 (2011); Atchinson v. Dist. of Columbia, 73 F.3d 418, 420–21 (D.C.Cir.1996); see also Pembaur v. Cincinnati, 475 U.S. 469, 479, 106 S.Ct. 1292, 89 L.Ed.2d 452 (1986) (“[W]hile Congress never questioned its power to impose civil liability on municipalities for their own illegal acts, Congress did doubt its constitutional power to impose such liability in order to oblige municipalities to control the conduct of others ”) (citation omitted). Such “official municipal policy” can include “the decisions of a government's lawmakers, the acts of its policymaking officials, and practices so persistent and widespread as to practically have the force of law.” Connick, 131 S.Ct. at 1359;Bd. of Cnty. Comm'rs of Bryan Cnty. v. Brown, 520 U.S. 397, 403–04, 117 S.Ct. 1382, 137 L.Ed.2d 626 (1997).

A municipality's “fail[ure] to act affirmatively at all” can also constitute a municipal policy or custom for purposes of liability under § 1983 “when it can be said that the failure amounts to deliberate indifference towards the constitutional rights of persons in its domain.” Brown, 520 U.S. at 418, 117 S.Ct. 1382;Daskalea v. Dist. of Columbia, 227 F.3d 433, 441 (D.C.Cir.2000) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). This theory of “deliberate indifference” has been described by the Supreme Court as:

[w]here, in the most obvious example, the policymaker sits on his hands after repeated, unlawful acts of subordinate officers and that failure evidences a deliberate indifference to the rights of the municipality's inhabitants, the policymaker's toleration of the subordinates' behavior establishes a policy-in-practice just as readily attributable to the municipality as the one-act policy-in-practice described above. Such a policy choice may be inferred even without a pattern of acts by subordinate officers, so long as the need for action by the policymaker is so obvious that the failure to act rises to deliberate indifference.

Brown, 520 U.S. at 418, 117 S.Ct. 1382 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).

To state a claim of deliberate indifference, the plaintiff must plead facts sufficient to contend that a municipality, such as the District, knew or should have known of a risk that constitutional violations would occur, but did nothing. Baker v. Dist. of Columbia, 326 F.3d 1302, 1306–07 (D.C.Cir.2003). Put simply, if a municipality adopts a policy of inaction when faced with actual or constructive knowledge that its agents will likely violate constitutional rights, it is “deliberately indifferent to a substantial risk of harm [that] is equivalent to the intentional action that setting policy presupposes.” Brown, 520 U.S. at 419, 117 S.Ct. 1382;Warren, 353 F.3d at 39.

Last, plaintiff must plead facts to support an inference that some government custom or policy “caus[ed] an employee to violate another's constitutional rights.” Monell, 436 U.S. at 692, 98 S.Ct. 2018 (internal quotation marks omitted). In other words, plaintiff bears the burden of showing an “affirmative link such that a municipal policy was the moving force behind the constitutional violation.” Baker, 326 F.3d at 1306 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted); Warren, 353 F.3d at 39. Unfortunately for the plaintiff, he has done none of these things. How so?

II. Plaintiffs First Amendment Claim

Plaintiff alleges that the District, or “officers, agents, assistants or employees working under its supervision,” denied him “access to the [c]ourts in violation of the First Amendment” by failing to correct his last name in its official records or remedy the lack of District of Columbia legal materials in Pamunkey's law library. Compl. ¶¶ 30–35, 40, 44–46, 51, 53. As a result of the District's failure to act, plaintiff asserts that he “was unable to effectively correspond with his attorney to raise a claim at his sentencing hearing that there were erroneous crimes on his pre-sentence report” or “research and bring colorable constitutional claims concerning his injuries” inflicted by the District and the Virginia defendants during incarceration. Id. ¶¶ 36–38, 41–42, 44, 48–50. Even if...