Williams v. Boles

• Citation: 841 F.2d 181
• Decision Date: 02 March 1988
• Docket Number: No. 87-1490,87-1490
• Parties: Melvin WILLIAMS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Jack BOLES, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (7th Circuit)

Page 181

841 F.2d 181

Melvin WILLIAMS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Jack BOLES, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 87-1490.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued Feb. 8, 1988.

Decided March 2, 1988.

Douglas F. Fuson, Sidley & Austin, Chicago, Ill., for plaintiff-appellant.

Karen S. Rosenwinkel, Civil Appeal, Atty. Gen. Office, Chicago, Ill., for defendants-appellees.

Before POSNER, COFFEY, and EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judges.

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge.

Melvin Williams, an inmate of Stateville prison in Illinois, contends that he was beaten without cause by a guard wielding a pipe and was sprayed with Mace by other guards on another occasion, also without cause. On each occasion guards restrained him, causing further injury. The jury in this action under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 either found or assumed that the guards restrained, beat and sprayed him without justification but spontaneously returned this special verdict:

We, the jurors, find for the defendant [sic] in as much as the evidence does not prove the plaintiff was severely injured.

Williams contends on appeal that "severe injury" is not an element of the constitutional tort. Much as we are inclined to agree, we are not authorized to disturb the judgment; Williams himself proposed an instruction informing the jury that "severe injury" is an essential element.

We shall assume that Williams proved that he was attacked without provocation and injured, though not severely. An administrative tribunal within the prison found Williams's version of the events to be true. He received medical care after the battery with the pipe, which caused headaches for weeks and left a scar. The Mace caused burning of the skin and eyes for 10 hours, and the associated restraint has limited the mobility of Williams's fingers.

Williams challenges the instructions to the jury in three respects. Two of these--that one defendant was omitted from the charge to the jury on one count of the complaint, and that the instructions do not properly set out the elements of civil conspiracy--do not require extended discussion. The conspiracy instruction, although skimpy, covered the elements; given the jury's special verdict, this instruction plainly was not the cause of Williams's defeat. So too with the omission of one defendant. Williams's counsel did not call the court's attention to this inadvertent omission during the instruction conference. At all events, the defendants prevailed because of the failure to prove "severe" injury; adding another defendant to the lists on Count I would not have availed Williams.

The instruction concerning severe injury was based on Gumz v. Morrissette, 772 F.2d 1395, 1400 (7th Cir.1985), which held that a claim of excessive force during an arrest should be evaluated as a matter of "substantive due process" and, to provide "guidance in making this delicate determination" offered district courts a formula containing three factors, one of which was whether the force employed "caused severe injuries." The jury instruction was lifted almost verbatim from Gumz.

Our court did not attempt in Gumz to reconcile the "severe injury" requirement with cases such as Parratt v. Taylor, 451 U.S. 527, 101 S.Ct. 1908, 68 L.Ed.2d 420 (1981), which holds that the Due Process Clause provides a remedy even for small injuries (in Parratt, the disappearance of a prisoner's "hobby kit" worth $8). The negligence test of Parratt was overruled by Daniels v. Williams, 474 U.S. 327, 106 S.Ct. 662, 88 L.Ed.2d 662 (1986), in favor of treating a due process claim as an intentional tort, but the Court has never questioned the principle that the Due Process Clause applies to small deprivations as well as great ones. Many things--beating with a rubber truncheon, water torture, electric shock, incessant noise, reruns of "Space 1999"--may cause agony as they occur yet leave no enduring injury. The state is not free to inflict such pains without cause just so long as it is careful to leave no marks. Cf. Lewis v. Lane, 816 F.2d 1165, 1171 (7th Cir.1987). The injury must be more than trifling--an allegation that a guard curled his lip at Williams without notice and an opportunity for a hearing would not state a claim, see Bart v. Telford, 677 F.2d 622, 625 (7th Cir.1982) (de minimis non curat lex applies to constitutional torts as well as common law torts)--but Williams's injuries exceed that threshold.

A concurring opinion in Gumz contended that the majority's approach was mistaken, and that the fourth amendment's standards should govern application of force at the time of arrest. On this approach, the reasonableness of the conduct rather than the severity of the injury (and the state of the officers' mind) would control. 772 F.2d at 1404-08. The concurrence maintained that courts should apply the specific clauses of the Bill of Rights to the situations they cover--for an arrest, the fourth amendment--rather than new approaches of the courts' devising. Five months ago, after the trial of this case had been completed, we overruled Gumz and adopted the approach of the concurring opinion for cases dealing with arrests. Lester v. City of Chicago, 830 F.2d 706 (7th Cir.1987).

If this were a fourth amendment case, Williams would not need to prove severe injury. A person arrested without probable cause and detained for 20 minutes is entitled to some relief, whether or not the violation of the Constitution leaves a lingering injury. A person beaten with a pipe until bloody deserves no worse. Yet it is hard to treat this as a fourth amendment case. Williams was not being arrested. He is a prisoner; the judgment convicting him of crime extinguished, for the duration of his sentence, his interest in privacy and personal mobility. Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 104 S.Ct. 3194, 82 L.Ed.2d 393 (1984).

Since Williams is a prisoner, the applicable provision is the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause of the eighth amendment. Whitley v. Albers, 475 U.S. 312, 106 S.Ct....