Sanchez v. Young Cnty.

• Citation: 956 F.3d 785
• Decision Date: 22 April 2020
• Docket Number: No. 19-10222,19-10222
• Parties: Nichole SANCHEZ; Casy Simpson; Edward Laroy Simpson, II, Individually and as the Representative of the Estate of Diana Lynn Simpson, Plaintiffs - Appellants v. YOUNG COUNTY, TEXAS ; Young County Sheriff's Department, Defendants - Appellees
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (5th Circuit)

956 F.3d 785

Nichole SANCHEZ; Casy Simpson; Edward Laroy Simpson, II, Individually and as the Representative of the Estate of Diana Lynn Simpson, Plaintiffs - Appellants

v.YOUNG COUNTY, TEXAS ; Young County Sheriff's Department, Defendants - Appellees

No. 19-10222

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

FILED April 22, 2020

Christine Lynne Stetson, Jamie D. Matuska, Bernsen Law Firm, Joseph F. Cleveland, Jr., Kevin C. Smith, Litigation Counsel, Brackett & Ellis, P.C., Fort Worth, TX, Majd M. Ghanayem, MMG Law Firm, Abilene, TX, for Plaintiffs - Appellants.

Stephen Cass Weiland, Esq., Robert Allen Hawkins, Esq., Squire Patton Boggs, L.L.P., Dallas, TX, for Defendants - Appellees.

Charles William Fillmore, Attorney, Fillmore Law Firm, L.L.P., Fort Worth, TX, for Amicus Curiae.

Before CLEMENT, HIGGINSON, and ENGELHARDT, Circuit Judges.

EDITH BROWN CLEMENT, Circuit Judge:

Diana Simpson died of a drug overdose while she was a pretrial detainee at the Young County Jail. Her family (Plaintiffs) sued Young County for her death under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. We previously affirmed summary judgment for the County in part, dismissing Plaintiffs’ episodic-acts-or-omissions theory of liability. Sanchez v. Young County (Sanchez I) , 866 F.3d 274, 280 (5th Cir. 2017). But we remanded for the district court to evaluate Plaintiffs’ conditions-of-confinement theory in the first instance. Id. at 279. The district court granted summary judgment for the County on that theory, too. Plaintiffs appeal. We reverse in part and remand.

I.

Simpson’s death was a suicide. This was not her first attempt. After her previous attempt, she told her husband that, were she to try again, she would get cash from an ATM and go to a motel so that he could not find her. Once there, she would overdose on pills. So her husband was understandably concerned when, a few weeks after Simpson said this, he noticed a cash withdrawal from his bank account.

He tried to contact Simpson, but she did not respond. He called the hospital where she worked, but she was not there. When she did not report for her shift the next evening, he called law enforcement and filed missing-person and be-on-the-lookout reports. Eventually, someone saw her car on the side of the road in a nearby city and called the police.

Police officers found Simpson asleep in her vehicle. They woke her and noticed that her "speech was slurred, that she was slow on her answers, and that [she was] talking real[ly] quiet[ly]." She "had a hard time keeping her eyes open to talk," "kept leaning her head back against" the headrest, and "had a hard time getting her [license] out of her wallet that was in her lap" and "trying to get a cup of water to her mouth" for a drink. She denied being diabetic or having any medical conditions. She initially denied taking any medications and said that she had something to drink the previous night to help her sleep. The officers called EMS to come evaluate her. EMS medics determined that her vitals were "fine" and that her blood sugar was normal, but noted that her blood pressure was high and her pulse was low.

According to the officers, she "was unsteady on her feet and almost fell down"; she "had to be assisted while walking and could not stand on her own." With Simpson’s permission, they searched her car and found beer cans—some empty—and empty blister packs for twenty-four pills. These pills included antihistamines, muscle relaxers, and antipsychotics. They asked her how much she took. Her answer: "all of it." She denied to officers that she was trying to hurt herself and declined to go to the hospital. But she told one of the medics that she was trying to kill herself.

The officers determined that Simpson, if left alone, was a danger to herself or to others, "due to her being on some type of medication," so they arrested her for public intoxication and took her to Young County Jail.

When Simpson arrived, jailers started the book-in process. They never finished. On the suicide-screening form, they completed only the detainee-question portion; left undone was the portion for jailer observations. Completing that form is mandatory, but because they thought that Simpson was drunk, they put her in a holding cell at 6:30 p.m. to "sleep it off." Several jailers stated that this and other book-in forms, such as a computer-based medical intake form, did not have to be completed at intake; they could be completed later. Jailers also stated that they could review the state-mandated Continuity of Care Query results later. See 37 TEX. ADMIN CODE § 273.5(b), (c). The Query results show if a detainee has received state-provided mental-health services.

The Query results confirmed that Simpson had received such services, but jailers did not review this information. Nor did they consider the be-on-the-lookout report, the arrest report, the officers’ statements, or that officers brought to the jail a bag of the empty pill packs—all of which suggested that Simpson had taken medication and could be in danger. Instead, jailers relied on Simpson’s responses to their questions and put on her screening form that she was not on medication.

Simpson’s husband called the jail three times to check on her. But jailers apparently did not consider the information that he provided when determining whether Simpson needed medical care. In his first call, before she arrived at the jail, he told jailers that she had been missing for two days and was suicidal. In his second call, after she had arrived, he again said that she was threatening suicide and asked that the jail get her help. That jailer did not think these warnings were relevant because, according to him, the jail would not contact mental-health services unless Simpson was sober and attempted or admitted to attempting suicide at the jail. Her husband’s third call was after she died.

When a jailer returned to complete the book-in process at 2:55 a.m., Simpson was on the cell floor, unresponsive and naked from the waist down. She had been lying there, half-naked, almost the entire night. Jailers took her to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. Her cause of death was "mixed drug intoxication."

While Simpson was in the cell, jailers performed periodic cell checks. The only way to see Simpson in the cell during these checks was to slide open an observation window on the cell door. These cell checks were logged using an electronic wand system. According to the cell-check logs, jailers checked on Simpson every 25 minutes between 6:52 p.m. and 2:54 a.m., and two jailers swore that the logs were accurate. But a subsequent Texas Ranger investigation revealed at least four discrepancies with the logs and video recordings of Simpson’s cell. First, the jail somehow lost the recording for 7:52 p.m.–2:00 a.m. The investigating Texas Ranger made several unsuccessful attempts to obtain this missing recording—the jail administrator sent CDs supposedly containing the missing recording several times, but none covered the missing six-hour window. The administrator’s explanations for these mix-ups were that he downloaded the wrong day, then that the system had been upgraded, and then that the video was inexplicably gone. The company that performed the upgrade, however, stated that the upgrade would not affect the recording. Second, the recordings that are available show that no one checked on Simpson between 6:52 p.m. and 7:52 p.m., despite cell-check logs showing otherwise. Third, the recordings show a cell check at 2:45 a.m., but that check was not logged; and the log shows a cell check at 2:18 a.m., but that check is not on the recording. Fourth, the recordings show that, contrary to jailers’ statements, Simpson does not move at all after 2:00 a.m.

The County did not conduct its own investigation of Simpson’s death, and the County sheriff and jail administrator testified that there were no issues with jail policies and that Simpson’s death was a suicide that no one could have detected. No jailers were reprimanded or fired because of Simpson’s death.

In the five years before Simpson’s death, numerous Texas Commission on Jail Standards reports noted that the County jail failed to document observations of inmates, failed to conduct hourly face-to-face observations, failed to conduct thirty-minute observations of detainees in holding or detox cells, and failed to properly complete intake screening forms. After Simpson’s death, Commission reports noted several more potential shortcomings at the jail: failing to notify the magistrate or state mental-health services of inmates who may have mental-health issues, exceeding thirty-minute observation intervals of holding and detox cells, failing to provide "efficient and prompt care to inmates for acute situations," and using observation forms without properly recording times.

Plaintiffs sued the County for Simpson’s death under § 1983, alleging Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment violations, and under the Texas Tort Claims Act. After removing the case to federal court, the County moved for summary judgment on all claims. The district court granted the motion. Plaintiffs appealed the dismissal of only their § 1983 claim. We affirmed in part, dismissing Plaintiffs’ § 1983 claim to the extent that it was based on an episodic-acts-or-omissions liability theory. Sanchez I , 866 F.3d at 280. But we held that the district court erred in failing to consider Plaintiffs’ alternative conditions-of-confinement theory and, therefore, remanded for the district court to consider whether a genuine dispute of material fact existed under that theory. Id. at 280–81.

On remand, Plaintiffs amended their complaint to allege twelve de facto policies that caused Simpson to be denied her constitutional right to medical care:

a. Defendant Young County had no actual procedure for an assessment or determination of the suicide risk of pretrial detainees, despite the existence of a form, as the de facto policy of Young County officials was not to complete

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