Winfield v. Bass
| Decision Date | 31 January 1997 |
| Docket Number | 95-6422,Nos. 94-7346,s. 94-7346 |
| Parties | Rodney WINFIELD, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. G.L. BASS; Kelvin Carlyle; Anthony Clatterbuck; James Hicks; Galvin Sizemore; Ronald Williams, or Walter Williams; Donald Wilmouth, Lieutenant, Defendants-Appellants, and Unknown Prison Guards, Defendants. Rodney WINFIELD, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. G.L. BASS; Kelvin Carlyle; Anthony Clatterbuck; James Hicks; Galvin Sizemore; Ronald Williams, or Walter Williams; Donald Wilmouth, Lieutenant, Defendants-Appellants, and Unknown Prison Guards, Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit |
ARGUED: Lance Bradford Leggitt, Assistant Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General, Richmond, VA, for Appellants. Saad El-Amin, El-Amin & Crawford, P.C., Richmond, VA, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: James S. Gilmore, III, Attorney General, Pamela A. Sargent, Assistant Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General, Richmond, VA, for Appellants. Beverly D. Crawford, El-Amin & Crawford, P.C., Richmond, VA, for Appellee.
Before WILKINSON, Chief Judge, and RUSSELL, WIDENER, HALL, MURNAGHAN, ERVIN, WILKINS, NIEMEYER, HAMILTON, LUTTIG, WILLIAMS, MICHAEL, and MOTZ, Circuit Judges, and PHILLIPS, Senior Circuit Judge.
Reversed by published opinion. Judge WILKINS wrote the majority opinion, in which Chief Judge WILKINSON and Judges RUSSELL, WIDENER, NIEMEYER, HAMILTON, LUTTIG, WILLIAMS, and MOTZ joined. Chief Judge WILKINSON wrote a concurring opinion, in which Judges RUSSELL, WIDENER, and HAMILTON joined. Judge MOTZ wrote a concurring opinion. Senior Judge PHILLIPS wrote a dissenting opinion, in which Judges HALL, MURNAGHAN, ERVIN, and MICHAEL joined.
Rodney Winfield, an inmate at a Virginia state correctional facility, brought this action pursuant to 42 U.S.C.A. § 1983 (West 1994), alleging that prison officials violated his constitutional rights under the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments by failing to protect him from another inmate, T. Gibson, who attacked Winfield with a metal shank. Specifically, Winfield claimed that the prison officials exhibited deliberate indifference to his safety by failing to restrain Gibson prior to the attack and by declining to intervene after the attack began. Appellants--Warden G.L. Bass and Correctional Officers Kelvin Carlyle, Anthony Clatterbuck, James Hicks, Galvin Sizemore, Ronald Williams, and Donald Wilmouth--appeal the denial by the district court of their claim that they are entitled to summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity. Because we conclude that the district court erred in refusing to grant summary judgment in favor of Appellants, we reverse.
The evidence presented by Appellants in support of their motion for summary judgment set forth the following facts. Winfield and Gibson were confined at the Greensville Correctional Center. Late on the evening of February 3, 1993, Winfield, Gibson, and a third inmate were conversing in a cell when a dispute developed between Winfield and Gibson. A scuffle ensued that spilled out of the cell and onto the second-floor tier of the prison. Responding to this disturbance, at least six officers proceeded to the second floor. The fray had ended by the time they arrived, however, because the inmates immediately dispersed when they saw the officers advancing. When the supervising officer, Lt. Hicks, directed that Gibson be removed from the tier, the other prisoners protested, insisting that Gibson had done nothing wrong. Fearing that an attempt to move Gibson under these circumstances might result in a major disturbance, Lt. Hicks ordered all except two of the officers to withdraw from the tier to prevent the confrontation from escalating. Only Officers Williams and Walker remained outside Gibson's cell; neither officer was armed.
At this point, events began to unfold swiftly. Gibson suddenly and without warning emerged from his cell wielding a homemade knife, striking Officer Williams in the face with his fist, knocking him back against the second-tier railing. Gibson then bolted into Winfield's cell three doors away. Officer Walker immediately radioed for assistance. After Officer Clatterbuck, who was now on the first floor, observed Gibson running from his cell, he instantly yelled out a warning that Gibson had a knife. Officer Clatterbuck and the other correctional officers present then hurried to the nearby control booth to obtain batons and returned to the second tier.
In the meantime, once inside Winfield's cell, Gibson began swinging the shank, striking Winfield. Before the prison staff responded, another inmate, John Scott, entered Winfield's cell and, although stabbed by Gibson, was able to wrestle the shank away from him. The entire incident happened very quickly; only ten seconds were estimated to have elapsed between the assault on Officer Williams and Scott's successful effort to disarm Gibson. Order was restored, and Warden Bass was advised of the disturbance.
In response to the prison officials' motion for summary judgment, Winfield presented his affidavit and documentation from his inmate grievance proceedings. These materials did not take issue with the substance of the factual assertions set forth in the prison officials' affidavits. They, however, did provide three additional allegations concerning these events that had not been included in the officers' submission and that, for purposes of summary judgment, should be taken as true.
First, Winfield asserted that approximately one hour before the attack, Gibson, Winfield, and two other inmates had been drinking homemade wine. Moreover, he maintained that Lt. Sizemore and Officer Clatterbuck observed this behavior during their rounds. Gibson had a brief conversation with these officers at that time and apparently convinced them not to confiscate the wine.
Second, Winfield contended that when the inmates dispersed following his initial altercation with Gibson, he returned to his cell and pressed a buzzer that sent an electronic signal to a central location to indicate that he wished to have the door to his cell closed and locked. Despite several attempts by Winfield to have the door secured, the officers controlling the mechanism did not respond.
Third, and most importantly for our purposes, Winfield claimed that in order to enter the cell to extricate the shank from Gibson, Scott found it necessary to push past two officers who stood looking on throughout the attack. Further, Winfield asserted that neither of the officers attempted to provide assistance to Scott while he struggled with Gibson for the shank.
Based on this record, the district court denied the prison officials' motion for summary judgment. With respect to their claim that there were no genuine issues of material fact necessitating a trial and that they were entitled to judgment as a matter of law, the district court reasoned:
After reviewing defendants' summary judgment motion and plaintiff's brief and affidavit opposing the motion, the Court finds that there are genuine issues of material fact in this case. Indeed, the Court finds that this case is peculiarly fact-specific and should thus proceed to trial on the merits.
J.A. 80. Turning to Appellants' argument that they were entitled to qualified immunity, the district court opined:
It is axiomatic that individuals incarcerated in correctional facilities are entitled to be kept secure, and that this right is protected by the Eighth Amendment, the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Moreover, this fundamental right to security certainly was "clearly established" at the time of the assault on plaintiff. Furthermore, where it appears from the factual allegations that prison inmates are allowed liberal access to alcoholic beverages and dangerous weapons, corrections officers are bound to know that the safety of other inmates is at risk.... Thus, reasonable people in defendants' position[s] would have known that their permissive attitude[s] toward[ ] spirits and shanks would violate the inmates' right to continued safety and security. Accordingly, the Court rejects defendants' qualified immunity defense.
The prison officials filed an appeal from the portion of this decision denying their motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity. In addition, the district court certified for immediate interlocutory appeal the remainder of its summary judgment decision. See 28 U.S.C.A. § 1292(b) (West 1993). And, this court subsequently entered an order permitting the permissive interlocutory appeal.
While the appeals were pending, the Supreme Court decided Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304, 115 S.Ct. 2151, 132 L.Ed.2d 238 (1995), addressing the jurisdiction of a federal appellate court to entertain an immediate appeal from a refusal of a district court to grant summary judgment based upon qualified immunity. Thereafter, relying on Johnson, a panel of this court issued an opinion concluding that we lacked jurisdiction over the appeal from the decision of the district court denying qualified immunity to Appellants and that permission for the interlocutory appeal of the remainder of the summary judgment order was granted improvidently. Winfield v. Bass, 67 F.3d 529 (4th Cir.1995). A majority of the court subsequently voted to hear these appeals en banc. Winfield v. Bass, 67 F.3d 529 (4th Cir.1996).
We first address our jurisdiction to entertain appeal number 94-7346, which challenges the decision of the district court denying Appellants' claim that they are entitled to qualified immunity. And, concluding that we possess jurisdiction to do so, we turn to consider whether the prison officials were entitled to qualified immunity. Because our determination that the district court erred in refusing to grant summary judgment to Appellants on the basis of...
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