Young v. Selk

• Decision Date: 28 November 2007
• Docket Number: No. 06-3883.,06-3883.
• Citation: 508 F.3d 868
• Parties: Kenneth Brian YOUNG, Appellee, v. Sergeant SELK; Sergeant Coolidge, Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit

508 F.3d 868

Kenneth Brian YOUNG, Appellee, v. Sergeant SELK; Sergeant Coolidge, Appellants.

No. 06-3883.

United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit.

Submitted: September 27, 2007.

Filed: November 28, 2007.

Erik M. Johnson, AAG, argued, Richard L. Varco, Jr., AAG, on the brief, St. Paul, MN, for appellant.

Gregory Scott Bachmeier, argued, Minneapolis, MN, for appellee.

Before COLLOTON, ARNOLD, and GRUENDER, Circuit Judges.

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.

Prisoner Kenneth Young brought an action against the Minnesota Department of Corrections (MDOC) and its officials under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, claiming that they violated the eighth amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment by failing to protect him from an assault by his roommate. His complaint also included an assault claim against his attackers. When MDOC and the prison officials moved to dismiss the claims against them the district court,¹ treating the motion as one for summary judgment, granted the motion in part. It denied the motion, however, as to Mr. Young's eighth amendment claims against Sergeant Van Coolidge and Sergeant Charles Selk in their individual capacities. The two prison employees appealed, contending that the district court should have dismissed these claims based on qualified immunity. We affirm.

I.

Though Sergeants Selk and Coolidge moved to dismiss, both they and Mr. Young in his response relied on matters outside the pleadings. The district court thus properly treated the motion as a request for summary judgment. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b). The denial of summary judgment based on qualified immunity is immediately appealable, and we review it de novo. See Sexton v. Martin, 210 F.3d 905, 909 (8th Cir.2000). We state the facts as viewed in the light most favorable to Mr. Young, drawing all reasonable inferences in his favor. See Burnham v. Ianni, 119 F.3d 668, 673 (8th Cir.1997) (en banc).

A few months after Mr. Young was incarcerated at the Rush City facility of MDOC (MDOC-RC), inmate Edward Whitefeather was placed in the cell with him. When Mr. Whitefeather arrived, Mr. Young said, "Hi" and offered to move his possessions out of Mr. Whitefeather's way because the room was small. Mr. Whitefeather did not respond.

Mr. Young next told Mr. Whitefeather that since he (Mr. Young) worked during the day, Mr. Whitefeather would have the room to himself. He added that he would appreciate it if Mr. Whitefeather kept the television volume down when Mr. Young came back during his lunch break so that he could get some "nap time," and that the room was otherwise "basically his" (Mr. Whitefeather's). Mr. Whitefeather then "went off the deep end about you don't tell me what to do or anything else [and] started talking about he's got friends." When Mr. Young said that he had intended to talk about these things "out of respect," Mr. Whitefeather said "well, mother fuck you, and everything else." Finally Mr. Whitefeather said that he would do whatever he wanted to do and that if Mr. Young didn't like it, he would have to "deal" with Mr. Whitefeather and his "boys."

After waiting about twenty minutes so as not to arouse Mr. Whitefeather's suspicions, Mr. Young left the room to seek assistance. Because he was new to that particular area of MDOC-RC, Mr. Young asked inmate Brian Brown — who had worked in the unit for some time as a janitor — whom he should talk to about moving to another cell. After introducing Mr. Young to Sergeant Coolidge at the guard desk, Mr. Brown told the sergeant that Mr. Young was having a problem with his roommate, who was of a different race, adding that "there is something wrong with the dude." When Sergeant Coolidge asked Mr. Young what the problem was, he responded that Mr. Whitefeather was "deranged" and had threatened him. Mr. Young added, "You gotta get me out of this room. I don't want to be in a situation. I don't want no problems with the guy." He asked "please" to be moved from the room "immediately" and offered to start packing up his things.

When asked to recount the conversation more specifically, Mr. Young testified that Sergeant Coolidge said something like "`I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can' or whatever guards do to blow you off. I said, `well, it's pretty urgent.'" When the sergeant suggested that Mr. Young write a kite (a prison form used by inmates for complaints or requests), Mr. Young responded that there was "not time for that" because it takes two or three days before anyone responds to a kite. Mr. Young was unsure of the exact words spoken in this conversation, but that "was the gist of it"; he had told the sergeant that he felt threatened and "explained it was an emergency, urgent." The sergeant "wasn't really involved in the conversation"; he was "fiddling around with paperwork and blew it off." When questioned further, Mr. Young said that he concluded that Sergeant Coolidge "blew him off" based on the sergeant's statements and his "condescending" manner when he told Mr. Young to speak to someone else. Mr. Young added that "[y]ou got a real sense of do I care about you? Go talk to such and such. Go talk to somebody else."

The next day, Mr. Young and Mr. Brown approached Sergeant Selk, who was then running the unit. Mr. Young testified that he told Sergeant Selk basically what he had told Sergeant Coolidge. He reported that Mr. Whitefeather had threatened him, and that he (Mr. Young) had been incarcerated for ten years, had never been in an altercation, and did not want to "have any situation." Mr. Young testified that he looked Sergeant Selk "in the face" while telling him that he was being threatened and that it was "an urgent matter." Sergeant Selk did not take any action on Mr. Young's request.

Later the same day that Mr. Young spoke to Sergeant Selk, Mr. Whitefeather, with the assistance of two other inmates, attacked Mr. Young while he was lying on his bunk. They had heated a mixture of honey, hair gel, tea, and water in a microwave oven, and Mr. Whitefeather poured the hot mixture on Mr. Young's face, neck, and chest, causing him second degree burns. Mr. Whitefeather then beat Mr. Young with a rock, wrapped in a sock, that was the size of a fist. Mr. Young was taken to the hospital for treatment. In his complaint, he seeks damages for physical and psychological injuries resulting from the assault.

II.

"Qualified immunity protects state officials from civil liability for actions that do not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." Shockency v. Ramsey County, 493 F.3d 941, 947 (8th Cir.2007) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). When deciding whether an official is entitled to qualified immunity, we first determine whether he or she violated a federal right at all; if so, we then determine whether that right was clearly established. See Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730, 736, 122 S.Ct. 2508, 153 L.Ed.2d 666 (2002); Coonts v. Potts, 316 F.3d 745, 750 (8th Cir.2003).

A.

Because being subjected to assault is not "part of the penalty that criminal offenders [must] pay for their offenses," Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U.S. 337, 347, 101 S.Ct. 2392, 69 L.Ed.2d 59 (1981), the eighth amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment requires prison officials to "take reasonable measures to guarantee" inmate safety by protecting them from attacks by other prisoners, Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 832, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Of course, prison officials do not commit a constitutional violation every time one prisoner attacks another. See id. at 834, 114 S.Ct. 1970; Blades v. Schuetzle, 302 F.3d 801, 803-04 (8th Cir. 2002). In order to establish an eighth amendment failure-to-protect claim, a plaintiff must show that the prison official was deliberately indifferent to a "substantial risk of serious harm." Farmer, 511 U.S. at 828, 114 S.Ct. 1970. To succeed on such a claim, the plaintiff must first establish that the alleged constitutional deprivation was "objectively, sufficiently serious," which requires a showing that the official's failure to protect resulted in the inmate being "incarcerated under conditions posing a substantial risk of serious harm." Id. at 834, 114 S.Ct. 1970.

Sergeants Coolidge and Selk argue that Mr. Young failed to offer sufficient evidence that Mr. Young actually faced a substantial risk of serious harm. At oral argument, the defendants' counsel maintained that since the question is whether there was actually a substantial risk — as opposed to whether Mr. Young described a substantial risk to the prison officials — Mr. Young can establish this element of his eighth amendment claim only through evidence of what Mr. Whitefeather said and did when he arrived at the cell. We agree that Mr. Whitefeather's conduct, rather than Mr. Young's account to the defendants, is the most probative evidence of the degree and type of risk that he faced, though we think that evidence of his state of mind might also be of some relevance. For example, the fact that Mr. Young promptly reported a threat, asked to be moved immediately, and, when no help was forthcoming, made the same plea the next day, may be some evidence of the existence of a risk of harm. In a case that the defendants rely on, we considered a plaintiff's failure to express fear or to accept an offer of protective custody as some evidence that a substantial risk of serious harm did not exist. See Berry v. Sherman, 365 F.3d 631, 634-35 (8th Cir.2004).

In any event, we believe that Mr. Whitefeather's conduct upon his arrival in Mr. Young's cell alone raises a reasonable inference of a substantial threat of violence against the plaintiff. Mr. Young, who had been incarcerated for ten years, testified that prisoners usually set out ground rules for how they will share the space when they are first placed in a cell together. Consistent with this practice, Mr....