Valencia v. Wiggins
| Decision Date | 18 January 1993 |
| Docket Number | No. 91-8018,91-8018 |
| Citation | 981 F.2d 1440 |
| Parties | Raul Jose VALENCIA, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Garry D. WIGGINS, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit |
Douglas M. Becker and Roger Moore, Gary & Becker, Austin, TX, for defendant-appellant.
J. Patrick Wiseman and Edward Tuddenham, Richards, Wiseman & Durst, Austin, TX, for plaintiff-appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas.
Before GOLDBERG, JOLLY, and WIENER, Circuit Judges.
This appeal results from a pretrial detainee's civil rights suit against a county jailer. The district court found that the jail official used force greatly in excess of that which was reasonable under the circumstances. The court also found that the official acted maliciously toward the pretrial detainee with the intention to punish him, and that qualified immunity was not available. A money judgment was rendered in favor of the detainee. Concluding that the district court's findings of fact were not clearly erroneous, we find the jail official not entitled to qualified immunity. And, agreeing with the district court that the jail official used force maliciously and sadistically with the intent to punish the pretrial detainee, we affirm.
As a result of an undercover police operation conducted by Defendant-Appellant Gary D. Wiggins, Plaintiff-Appellee Raul Jose Valencia was arrested on drug charges. On July 3, 1987, Valencia was committed to Brewster County (Texas) Jail. Shortly thereafter, Wiggins ceased work as an undercover agent and became Acting Chief Deputy of Brewster County Jail, responsible for, among other things, supervision of the jail.
One evening three weeks into his pretrial detention, Valencia took part in a jail disturbance in which the inmates made excessive noise and threw objects out of cells. The next day, the inmates, including Valencia, again created a disturbance by singing and making noise. Jailer Joaquin Jackson requested that the inmates quiet down. When they refused, Jackson summoned Wiggins, who reiterated Jackson's command. Unlike most other inmates, however, Valencia and his cellmate, Gilbert "Bebo" Espinosa, continued to make noise. Wiggins then ordered Valencia out of his cell. Valencia refused to come out, and instead asked why he was being singled out. At that point, Wiggins entered Valencia's cell to enforce his order. Participants and witnesses give quite different accounts of what transpired next. Valencia contends that Wiggins grabbed him by the hair and bashed his head repeatedly against the cell bars. Wiggins asserts, on the other hand, that Valencia's head accidentally hit the bars during this altercation. Espinosa testified, in what perhaps is a third version of events, that Valencia's head hit the bars when he stiffened his body to resist removal from the cell. Irrespective of those conflicting reasons, there is general agreement on what happened next: Wiggins applied a choke hold that left Valencia momentarily unconscious. After getting him to the floor, Wiggins put Valencia in handcuffs.
Wiggins and the other jailer then took Valencia downstairs to the drunk tank. Valencia testified that, after Wiggins ordered the other jailer to close the door and wait, he (Wiggins) went into the drunk tank with Valencia and struck him at least three times while he was handcuffed and on his knees. Not surprisingly, Wiggins's version of events is quite different. He testified that he and the other jailer escorted Valencia to the drunk tank, removed the handcuffs, shut the door, and left Valencia alone in the cell. Wiggins claims that he never struck Valencia.
Two days after this incident, and for reasons that are not stated in the record, Valencia was moved to the Pecos County Jail. But because that jail had no room, Valencia was moved once again, this time to the Law Enforcement Center. There, the interviewing jailer noted that Valencia had visible injuries, including bruises on his face and scratches and cuts on his throat, but concluded that these injuries did not require immediate medical attention. Several days later, Valencia was visited by an attorney who also noticed the bruises and scratches. Although Valencia testified that his voice was damaged permanently as a result of the choke hold applied by Wiggins in the upstairs incident, both his cousin and a jailer at the Brewster County Jail (who was also a friend of Valencia's family), testified that they noticed no change.
Valencia filed this civil rights action, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, complaining that Wiggins and another jailer violated his constitutional rights by using excessive force during his incarceration in the Brewster County Jail. 1 Subsequently, Wiggins filed a motion for summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity. Rather than ruling immediately on Wiggins's motion, however, the trial judge carried it with the case.
After a bench trial, the district court found for Valencia, and ordered Wiggins to pay damages to Valencia in the amount of $2,500. 2 The district court made the following factual findings: Valencia refused to come out of his cell; to enforce his order, Wiggins entered the cell; "[a] wrestling match ensued during which Wiggins hit Valencia's head against the jail bars and applied a 'choke hold' rendering Valencia momentarily unconscious"; Wiggins's methods of enforcing jail discipline were "unreasonable and clearly excessive"; Wiggins went into the drunk tank with Valencia and shut the door; "Wiggins then struck Valencia while he was cuffed and on his knees at least three times"; and Valencia's scratches, cuts, and bruises were serious, but did not require medical attention.
As to the applicable law, the district court concluded that because Valencia was a pretrial detainee, the case involved the Fourteenth Amendment's protection against summary punishment, not the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable seizures" or the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments." And finding Wiggins's use of force to be both excessive and malicious and Valencia's physical injuries to be "severe," the district court concluded that Valencia met his burden under Shillingford v. Holmes, 3 the case which, at the time of the incident, articulated this court's substantive due process standard for claims of excessive use of official force. Additionally, the court found that Wiggins was not entitled to qualified immunity, presumably because this court stated in Stevens v. Corbell, 4 that immunity is not available in excessive force cases. Finally, in a supplemental order entered two months after trial, the district court granted Valencia approximately $27,600 in attorney's fees and costs.
Wiggins appealed to this court.
Wiggins argued in this pretrial detainee excessive force case that the district court should have used the Fourth Amendment's excessive force standard, set forth by the Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor, 5 and adopted with modification by this court in Johnson v. Morel. 6 Valencia, on the other hand, urged this court to continue using Shillingford, 7 which articulates a substantive due process standard derived from Johnson v. Glick, 8 the Second Circuit's seminal decision for excessive force claims.
We do not believe that the Fourth Amendment provides an appropriate constitutional basis for protecting against deliberate official uses of force occurring, as in this case, after the incidents of arrest are completed, after the plaintiff has been released from the arresting officer's custody, and after the plaintiff has been in detention awaiting trial for a significant period of time. Our reasons for so deciding are threefold. First, we believe that the Fourth Amendment itself provides weak textual support for such an extension. As the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable "seizures," it seems primarily directed to the initial act of restraining an individual's liberty, 9 such as an investigatory stop or arrest. (Graham itself offers no explicit suggestion as to when a Fourth Amendment seizure comes to an end, although its facts indicate that a seizure under the Fourth Amendment does not end the moment the police gain custody and control over a suspect. 10 )
Subsequent to Graham, a number of circuits endorsed the extension of the Fourth Amendment to the period between arrest and charge, 11 or through the period in which an arrestee remains in the arresting officer's custody. 12 But we have discovered no case in which a court has ruled that the Fourth Amendment continues to protect against the official use of force in the attenuated stage of pretrial detention at issue here. 13 Therefore, without deciding whether the concept of continuing seizure is appropriate in other contexts, we find that the concept of "seizure" in the Fourth Amendment is not so capacious or elastic as to cover pretrial detention three weeks after the initial arrest, the period at issue in this case.
Our second reason for not extending the Fourth Amendment to cover this period of pretrial detention is that the Supreme Court, in several recent cases, has been markedly unwilling to concede that the Fourth Amendment protects inmates after incarceration. 14 For instance, in Bell v. Wolfish, 15 the Supreme Court refused to hold that a pretrial detainee has a privacy interest in his person that is protected by the Fourth Amendment. (The Court then proceeded to find that, even if the Fourth Amendment were implicated, the institution's practice of requiring detainees to expose their body cavities for visual inspection after contact visits with persons from outside the institution was reasonable). Similarly, in Hudson v. Palmer, 16 the Court concluded that the Fourth Amendment protects neither a prisoner's privacy interest in his...
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