Tafoya v. Salazar

• Decision Date: 21 February 2008
• Docket Number: No. 06-1191.,06-1191.
• Citation: 516 F.3d 912
• Parties: Michelle TAFOYA, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Huerfano County Sheriff John SALAZAR, Defendant-Appellee, and Alan Ruiz, Defendant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Tenth Circuit

516 F.3d 912

Michelle TAFOYA, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Huerfano County Sheriff John SALAZAR, Defendant-Appellee, and Alan Ruiz, Defendant.

No. 06-1191.

United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit.

February 21, 2008.

Jennifer Bisset, Bisset Law Firm, Englewood, CO, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Andrew D. Ringel (David R. Brougham with him on the brief), Hall & Evans, L.L.C., Denver, CO, for Defendant-Appellee.

Before KELLY, ANDERSON, and McCONNELL, Circuit Judges.

McCONNELL, Circuit Judge.

From 1995 to 2003, John Salazar served as the elected sheriff of Huerfano County, Colorado, responsible for the management and supervision of the Huerfano County Jail. In 1998, two independent incidents of sexual assault occurred in the jail, both perpetrated by male detention officers against female inmates. In Gonzales v. Martinez, 403 F.3d 1179 (10th Cir.2005), we found evidence that these assaults were the product of unconstitutional jail conditions maintained through the deliberate indifference of Sheriff Salazar, and noted many ways in which his administration of the jail fell below an acceptable standard. Three years after the assaults, on December 21, 2001 and again on December 30, 2001, plaintiff-appellant Michelle Tafoya was sexually assaulted by detention officer Alan Ruiz. Mr. Ruiz was later arrested for and convicted of the assaults.

Ms. Tafoya brings this civil action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against Sheriff Salazar and Mr. Ruiz.¹ Ms. Tafoya claims that Sheriff Salazar demonstrated deliberate indifference to the rights of inmates in his care and custody, subjecting her to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The district court granted Sheriff Salazar's motion for summary judgment, concluding that Ms. Tafoya had failed to provide evidence that Sheriff Salazar was actually aware of a substantial risk of harm to female inmates or to show a causal connection between his managerial deficiencies and the sexual assaults committed by Mr. Ruiz. Because we find that Sheriff Salazar was aware of prison conditions that were substantially likely to result in the sexual assault of a female inmate, and conclude that a jury might infer that the assaults on Ms. Tafoya were caused by these dangerous conditions, we reverse.

I. Background

In December, 2001, Ms. Tafoya was serving a one-year sentence at the Huerfano County Jail. Through her good behavior, Ms. Tafoya earned an appointment as a jail trustee. Jail trustees perform cooking and cleaning duties in exchange for a sentence reduction. At the time of the assaults, Ms. Tafoya was the only female trustee.

On December 21, 2001, Mr. Ruiz called Ms. Tafoya out of her cell to take the trash to the dumpster — one of her trustee duties. Mr. Ruiz escorted Ms. Tafoya outside to the dumpster, in violation of a jail policy that required female trustees to be accompanied by a female officer while cleaning or taking out the trash. Ms. Tafoya then returned to the kitchen to clean, where she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Ruiz. Ms. Tafoya did not immediately report the assault because she feared that she would not be believed by the other officer on duty and would have her trustee status revoked.

On December 30, 2001, Mr. Ruiz was working the graveyard shift from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. Ona Garcia, a female officer, was stationed in the control room where she could monitor the hallway leading to the kitchen over the surveillance cameras. There was no camera inside the kitchen. Ms. Tafoya entered the kitchen to perform her cooking and cleaning duties. While she was there, Mr. Ruiz entered, again in violation of the jail's "nocontact" policy between male detention officers and female inmates. He informed Ms. Tafoya that Ms. Garcia was asleep in the control room and sexually assaulted Ms. Tafoya a second time.

Mr. Ruiz was not the first Huerfano County Jail detention officer to sexually assault a female inmate at the jail. Detention officers Robert Martinez and Dominick Gonzales sexually assaulted two female inmates in 1998. Both were convicted and imprisoned for the offenses. Sheriff Salazar faced three civil suits as a result of these assaults. See Gonzales, 403 F.3d at 1179 (reversing the grant of summary judgment by the district court).

After the 1998 assaults, Sheriff Salazar took some steps to remedy the risk to female inmates of sexual assault. He fired Robert Martinez, the jail administrator and perpetrator of one of the assaults. He installed four additional surveillance cameras to cover unmonitored locations in the jail, including areas where the 1998 assaults had occurred, but not including the kitchen where the assault against Ms. Tafoya later took place. He also hired additional female staff and implemented a half day sexual harassment training on November 7, 2001, which Mr. Ruiz attended. The question we address here is whether, notwithstanding these steps, Sheriff Salazar's alleged failure to implement and enforce other policies to protect female inmates amounted to deliberate indifference in violation of the Constitution.

II. Discussion

A.

The Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment imposes a duty on prison officials to provide humane conditions of confinement, including adequate food, clothing, shelter, sanitation, medical care, and reasonable safety from serious bodily harm. Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 832, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994); Ramos v. Lamm, 639 F.2d 559, 566 (10th Cir.1980). However, this minimum standard does not impose constitutional liability on prison officials for every injury suffered by an inmate. First, the alleged injury or deprivation must be sufficiently serious. The official's act or omission must result in the denial of "the minimal civilized measure of life's necessities." Farmer, 511 U.S. at 834, 114 S.Ct. 1970. There is no question that sexual assault of the kind suffered by Ms. Tafoya meets this objective component of an Eighth Amendment claim. Hovater v. Robinson, 1 F.3d 1063, 1068 (10th Cir.1993) ("[A]n inmate has a constitutional right to be secure in her bodily integrity and free from attack by prison guards.").

Second, because the Eighth Amendment prohibits only cruel and unusual punishment, the prison official must have a sufficiently culpable state of mind to violate the constitutional standard. The standard of culpability necessary to an Eighth Amendment violation is one of deliberate indifference. "[A] prison official cannot be found liable under the Eighth Amendment for denying an inmate humane conditions of confinement unless the official knows of and disregards an excessive risk to inmate health or safety...." Farmer, 511 U.S. at 837, 114 S.Ct. 1970. The standard is subjective, requiring that the official actually be "aware of facts from which the inference could be drawn that a substantial risk of serious harm exists, and he must also draw the inference." Id. An official's failure to alleviate a significant risk of which he was unaware, no matter how obvious the risk or how gross his negligence in failing to perceive it, is not an infliction of punishment and therefore not a constitutional violation. Id. at 844, 114 S.Ct. 1970. The official's knowledge of the risk need not be knowledge of a substantial risk to a particular inmate, or knowledge of the particular manner in which injury might occur. Id. at 843, 114 S.Ct. 1970 (finding liability even though the prison official "did not know that the complainant was especially likely to be assaulted by the specific prisoner who eventually committed the assault."). "It does not matter whether the risk comes from a single source or multiple sources, any more than it matters whether a prisoner faces an excessive risk of assault for reasons personal to him or because all prisoners in his situation face such a risk." Gonzales, 403 F.3d at 1187 (quoting Farmer, 511 U.S. at 843, 114 S.Ct. 1970). However, even if a prison official has knowledge of a substantial risk of serious harm to inmates, he is not deliberately indifferent to that risk unless he is aware of and fails to take reasonable steps to alleviate that risk. See LaMarca v. Turner, 995 F.2d 1526, 1536 (11th Cir.1993).

Although deliberate indifference is a subjective inquiry, a jury is permitted to infer that a prison official had actual knowledge of the constitutionally infirm condition based solely on circumstantial evidence, such as the obviousness of the condition. Farmer, 511 U.S. at 842, 114 S.Ct. 1970. "[I]f a risk is obvious, so that a reasonable man would realize it, we might well infer that [the prison official] did in fact realize it." Garrett v. Stratman, 254 F.3d 946, 950 (10th Cir.2001) (quoting 1 W. LaFave & A. Scott, Substantive Criminal Law, § 3.7, at 335 (1986)). In response, the defendant may present evidence to show that he was in fact unaware of the risk, in spite of the obviousness.

B.

After the 1998 assaults, Sheriff Salazar was on notice of the dangerous conditions in the jail and was aware that his own indifference toward jail operations had contributed to those conditions. Given his knowledge, Sheriff Salazar was under a duty not only to take reasonable measures to remedy the circumstances that directly led to the sexual assaults, but to cure his own lack of attention and unresponsiveness to inmate complaints and other indicators of serious problems with his detention staff.

1.

In Gonzales v. Martinez, 403 F.3d 1179 (10th Cir.2005), we described the egregiously undisciplined behavior of the detention staff at the Huerfano County Jail prior to 1998, and Sheriff Salazar's "lackadaisical attitude toward his responsibility to run the institution." Id. at 1187. In Gonzales, we specifically called attention to Sheriff Salazar's failure to adequately address inmate complaints, conduct employee reviews and background checks, be physically present at the jail, and discipline the inappropriate conduct of detention officers. Because the...