Williams v. City of Cleveland

• Decision Date: 02 November 2018
• Docket Number: Nos. 16-4237/17-3508,s. 16-4237/17-3508
• Citation: 907 F.3d 924
• Parties: Tynisa WILLIAMS, Individually and on Behalf of a Class of Others Similarly Situated, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. CITY OF CLEVELAND, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

907 F.3d 924

Tynisa WILLIAMS, Individually and on Behalf of a Class of Others Similarly Situated, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.CITY OF CLEVELAND, Defendant-Appellant.

Nos. 16-4237/17-3508

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued: June 7, 2018

Decided and Filed: November 2, 2018

Rehearing En Banc Denied December 7, 2018

ARGUED: Stephen W. Funk, ROETZEL & ANDRESS, LPA, Akron, Ohio, for Appellant. Elmer Robert Keach, III, LAW OFFICES OF ELMER ROBERT KEACH, III, PC, Albany, New York, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Stephen W. Funk, ROETZEL & ANDRESS, LPA, Akron, Ohio, Thomas J. Kaiser, CITY OF CLEVELAND, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellant. Elmer Robert Keach, III, LAW OFFICES OF ELMER ROBERT KEACH, III, PC, Albany, New York, D. Aaron Rihn, ROBERT PEIRCE & ASSOCIATES, PC, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Nicholas Migliaccio, MIGLIACCIO & RATHOD, LLP, Washington, D.C., Daniel Karon, KARON LLP, Cleveland, Ohio, for Appellee.

Before: SILER, COOK, and WHITE, Circuit Judges.

SILER, J., delivered the opinion of the court in which COOK, J., joined, and WHITE, J., joined in part. WHITE, J. (pp. 938–41), delivered a separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part.

SILER, Circuit Judge.

In 2009, Tynisa Williams brought suit against the City of Cleveland ("the City"), on behalf of herself and others similarly situated,¹ pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983. She alleged that the City’s intake procedures conducted at its House of Corrections ("HOC")—consisting of strip searches and mandatory delousing—violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Williams’s case first came before this court in 2014, on appeal from the district court order granting the City’s motion for judgment on the pleadings. Williams v. City of Cleveland (Williams I ), 771 F.3d 945 (6th Cir. 2014). We found that Williams’s second amended complaint set forth a plausible claim for relief. On remand, and after extensive discovery, the district court granted Williams’s motion for summary judgment in part and denied the City’s motion in part.² It thereafter issued a permanent injunction in Williams’s favor, which enjoined the City from reinstituting its previous delousing method and from conducting group strip searches without installation of privacy partitions to obstruct the view of other inmates. Williams v. City of Cleveland (Williams II ), 210 F.Supp.3d 897, 908-09 (N.D. Ohio 2016).

The City now appeals the district court’s summary judgment and permanent injunction orders.³ For the reasons stated herein, we reverse the district court’s orders and remand with instructions to grant summary judgment in favor of the City on all counts and to vacate the permanent injunction.

FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

On October 30, 2009, Williams was pulled over and cited for driving with a suspended license. She was brought into the Justice Center, Cleveland’s downtown city jail. After spending the night in the downtown jail, Williams was driven to the HOC in a van with several other inmates. She was placed in a holding cell for three to four hours with approximately ten other female detainees. A female correctional officer took her to a back room with two other female detainees and gave them uniforms. The officer then provided the detainees with lock bins in which to store their street clothes and ordered the detainees to remove their clothing, including their bras and underwear. The detainees were then ordered to get into the shower, which had three separate stalls, and they were given about one minute to shower. The women were ordered to exit the shower, which left them standing approximately one foot from each other in the nude.

The correctional officer then proceeded to spray the detainees with a delousing solution, one at a time. Williams stated during her deposition that they were sprayed "over the whole body," from head to toe, with a "body mist." The solution "smelled like bug spray" and was sprayed on the detainees through a nozzle attached to a jug. Williams asserted that the officer was only standing six inches away from the inmates when they were sprayed. After delousing their front sides, the officer asked them to turn around, with their arms out and legs spread. Williams testified that she was ordered to "squat" during the delousing, but she was unaware of whether everyone who underwent the intake process was asked to squat while being deloused. Williams claimed that the spray "penetrated [her] anus." Williams admitted, however, that the spray was a "light mist," which did not "hit [her] with any kind of force." She only felt the mist because "it was a liquid and cold."

The officers then directed the detainees to put on their uniforms, without being given the opportunity to shower again. Williams waited for ten to fifteen minutes in the holding cell before being escorted to the pod: a large room with several bunks. She was then immediately released on bail, at approximately 6:00 p.m.

Later in 2009, Williams brought this class action against the City, arguing that she and similarly situated pretrial detainees were deprived of their Fourth Amendment rights when they were subjected to mandatory strip searches and delousing upon entry at the HOC without individualized suspicion of lice or concealed contraband. She sought monetary damages, a declaration that the City’s policies were unconstitutional, and an injunction precluding the City from continuing its allegedly unconstitutional practices.⁴

I. Stay Resulting From Florence

In 2011, the Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari to resolve the question of whether pretrial detainees could be strip searched upon entry into jail without individualized suspicion. Florence v. Bd. of Chosen Freeholders of Cty. of Burlington , 563 U.S. 917, 131 S.Ct. 1816, 179 L.Ed.2d 772 (2011). The district court granted the City’s motion to stay Williams’s class action until the Supreme Court decided Florence . The Court handed down its decision in 2012 and held that "undoubted security imperatives involved in jail supervision override the assertion that some detainees must be exempt from the more invasive search procedures at issue absent reasonable suspicion of a concealed weapon or other contraband." Id. at 330, 132 S.Ct. 1510. The Supreme Court clarified, "[t]here also may be legitimate concerns about the invasiveness of searches that involve the touching of detainees[,]" but it did not reach that issue in Florence because no such facts were alleged in that case. Id. at 339, 132 S.Ct. 1510. Moreover, as noted by the Fourth Circuit in Cantley v. West Virginia Regional Jail & Correctional Facility Authority , "[t]he Supreme Court did not expressly reach the delousing issue in [ Florence ], simply commenting that ‘[t]he danger of introducing lice or contagious infections’ into a detention facility ‘is well documented.’ " 771 F.3d 201, 206 n.3 (4th Cir. 2014).

The district court lifted the stay in Williams’s case in August 2012 and granted Williams’s motion to amend her complaint to add a class representative.⁵ The City moved for judgment on the pleadings, and Williams responded in opposition with a proposed second amended complaint. Williams alleged in her proposed complaint that the City employed a policy of directing correctional officers to "use pressurized metal spray cans to spray caustic delousing solution over the naked bodies and genitals of detainees." She took issue not only with "the use of delousing on all detainees, but also about the manner in which the delousing occurs." Williams alleged that the City directed correctional officers to "[f]orcibly spray[ ] the genitals of detainees, versus allowing detainees to apply the delousing solution themselves." Williams specifically claimed that the "delousing solution was sprayed all over her body, including into her anus when she bent over." The district court granted the City’s motion for judgment on the pleadings and denied Williams’s motion for leave to amend her complaint based on futility of the proposed amendment.

II. Williams I Ruling

Williams appealed to this court, which affirmed in part and reversed in part. Williams I , 771 F.3d at 956. In Williams I , we considered a single issue: whether Williams’s proposed complaint plausibly alleged a violation of the Fourth Amendment by claiming that the City’s jail, "instead of using less invasive procedures, compelled pretrial detainees who were being processed into the facility to undress in the presence of other detainees and to have their naked genitals sprayed with delousing solution from a pressurized metal canister." Id. at 947. We found that Williams’s proposed amended complaint had stated a claim for relief because it alleged facts indicating that the City conducted searches in an unreasonable manner. See id. at 952 (stating that, "although Florence permits the jail to conduct a suspicionless search of plaintiffs upon their entrance to the jail, the search must be conducted in a manner that is reasonably related to the jail’s legitimate objectives in discovering contraband and preventing the introduction of lice to the facility" (citations omitted) ). Thus, we previously concluded that, unless the City demonstrated a "good reason" for delousing inmates rather than allowing them to self-apply, such a decision would be a "needless intrusion into the detainees’ constitutional rights." Id. at 955. Such a determination was left for trial or summary judgment, and we remanded Williams’s matter to the district court for further proceedings. Id.

III. Summary Judgment Evidence

Back in the district court, both Williams and the City moved for summary judgment. Counsel filed the deposition transcripts of Mary Bounds, David Carroll, Lieutenant Stella Clark, Reginald Flowers, Jacqueline Lewis, Lieutenant Joseph Stottner, and Lieutenant Rufus Williams. The testimony of these officials partially confirmed Williams’s experience in October 2009 and partially contradicted Williams’s account of the HOC intake procedure at that time.

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