We just notched another win!
And updates on other recent work.
Friends,
The Ninth Circuit just issued its decision in Aberha v. Delafontaine, a Public Accountability case involving the constitutional right to freedom from sexual assault in prison. To recap: Our client told a guard that his cellmate had sexually assaulted him. The guard laughed at him and left him in his cell. Later that day, the cellmate threw our client against a wall, choked him out, and raped him. The district court denied the guard qualified immunity, but he took an interlocutory appeal to ask the Ninth Circuit to end the suit.
We represented the inmate on appeal—and we obtained a total victory. The Ninth Circuit’s decision, issued earlier today, affirms that prison guards have a constitutional duty to protect inmates from sexual assault. It explains that since 2009, “it has been clear that a correctional officer’s doing nothing in response to an inmate’s pleas for help after the inmate’s cellmate threatened physical violence is unreasonable”—and, therefore, that it violates the Eighth Amendment. Read the whole decision here.
In other news, it’s been a minute since our last update! Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve been up to the last few months:
Nazario v. Thibeault. Do prisoners have a clearly established right against being forced to participate in a “Covid party”? We think so—but the State of Connecticut disagrees. In April 2020, our client was forced to move from a cell block where everyone was healthy to one that was in the middle of an active Covid outbreak. He caught Covid—the original, extremely dangerous variant—and nearly died. The district court denied the prison warden’s request for qualified immunity and we’re asking the Second Circuit to affirm that decision on appeal. Read our brief here.
Mejia v. Miller. In this case, a federal BLM agent shot our client in the hand and head—for nothing more than a traffic violation. The district court denied his request for qualified immunity. On appeal, though, the Ninth Circuit held that our client didn’t even have the right to bring a claim under the “Bivens” doctrine. Bivens is what lets you sue federal agents for violating your constitutional rights. The Supreme Court has been cutting away at Bivens for decades, but it’s always said that the “core” of Bivens remains intact. This type of Fourth Amendment excessive force claim is as close to the core of Bivens as it gets, so we asked the Ninth Circuit to reconsider its decision en banc. Read our petition for rehearing here.
DeHart v. Tofte. Far-right extremists took over the Newberg School Board in Newberg, OR, and banned Black Lives Matter and Pride symbols. Some parents and teachers, concerned about this new and radical direction in their schools, joined a Facebook group to discuss ways they could hold their elected school-board directors accountable. In retaliation, the Board’s conservative majority sued four parents and teachers. We teamed up with the ACLU of Oregon and prominent local civil-rights lawyers to fight back. You can read our reply brief on appeal, which we filed just last month, here.
Index Newspapers v. City of Portland. In this case, we’re representing journalists and legal observers who covered the Portland protests of 2020 and were shot, beaten, and threatened with arrest in retaliation. The City moved to dismiss the case in December, claiming that it was “moot” because the protests had ended. That’d be a neat trick—not many protests outlast the court cases they kindle. You can read our response here.
If you’ve been wondering what happened to Clearly Established, our monthly roundup of accountability decisions from the federal courts of appeals, fear not—it’ll return next month. In the meantime, please feel free to send this newsletter to any friends or family who might find it interesting. If you got this from a friend, you can sign up to receive future issues here. And if you’re able to support our important work, please do:
Thanks for reading,
Athul K. Acharya
Founder & Executive Director
Public Accountability
Clearly Established #19
Week of August 5, 2022—Qualified immunity, standing, mootness, Bivens, and the Heck bar.
Welcome to the 19th issue of Clearly Established, a somewhat monthly, slightly irreverent roundup of recent accountability decisions. Let’s dive right in.
Man goes out of town and asks police to visit his wife for a welfare check. Cop visits wife, asks if she’s lonely, comments on her breasts, threatens to ticket her for having a bong, and ultimately coerces her into exposing herself while he “masturbated to ejaculation in front of her.” District court: He didn’t physically touch her, so he didn’t violate the constitution. Fifth Circuit: That’s not how this works. This is a constitutional violation—and an obvious one at that, so no qualified immunity.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott bans school districts from imposing mask mandates. Do severely disabled kids have standing—basically, some “skin in the game”—to seek an injunction against enforcement of that ban? Fifth Circuit (over a vigorous dissent): No. Just because you’re at high risk for severe illness if you get covid doesn’t mean you have enough skin in the game to sue over a ban on mask mandates. Dissent: This isn’t a simple “fear of covid” case. This is a disability-discrimination case, and we have laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability.
Texas denies religious group’s request to hold religious gatherings. After the group sues, Texas institutes a new policy allowing them to apply for a congregation—but never actually permits them to congregate. Texas: This new policy means the group’s suit is moot. Fifth Circuit: Not by a long shot. Judge Ho, concurring: Let’s add mootness to the list of “unholy” doctrines I complained about back in May. Together, these doctrines mean “no damages for past injury, due to immunity—and no injunction to stop future injury, due to mootness. Heads I win, tails you lose.” [We’re guessing the judge hired a very libertarian clerk this year, and we expect this rash of good concurrences to subside come September. —ed.]
A witness in a federal sex-trafficking investigation punches a woman and threatens her with a knife. When police arrive on the scene, the witness calls her handler—a local cop who’s part of the federal task force—who lies to the cops on the scene and gets the victim arrested for witness tampering. The victim spends years in federal custody before she’s acquitted. Once she’s out, she sues the cop. Eighth Circuit (2020): You can’t sue her as a fed; feds have broad immunity from civil-rights suits. (See our last issue for more on this.) Eighth Circuit (2022): And you can’t sue her as a local cop, either, because she was cross-deputized and acting as a fed.
Hawai‘i building inspector repeatedly investigates and prevents work on the renovation project of a Japanese homeowner who has hired white contractors. Inspector to homeowner’s neighbors: “I keep shutting them down but fuck these Haoles don’t listen, that’s why I try keep it local.” Homeowner sues under a little-used statute, 42 U.S.C. § 1981, that prohibits racial discrimination by public officials. Inspector: But his project really did violate code! Ninth Circuit: Doesn’t matter; “a law may be fair on its face but grossly unfair in its enforcement.” If you enforced the code more vigorously against him because he’s a Haole, you’ll have to pay up.
Under the “Heck bar,” if you’ve been convicted of a crime, you can’t bring a civil-rights claim that would call that conviction into question. In California, the crime of resisting arrest includes the element that the arrest was lawful; in other words, if a jury convicts you of that crime, it must necessarily have decided that the arrest you resisted was lawful. So if a cop uses excessive force to make an arrest and the arrestee sues the cop, what’s the logical next move? Prosecute the arrestee for resisting arrest! If you get a guilty verdict, boom, the excessive-force lawsuit is Heck barred. And that’s exactly what happened in this Ninth Circuit case.
Journalists attempt to film a police encounter in Lakewood, Colo. One officer obstructs the camera, shines a light into it so it can’t record anything else, and eventually gets in his cruiser and drives directly at the journalists, swerving away at the last minute. Qualified immunity? Tenth Circuit: No. The First Amendment protects the right to film police performing their duties in public. And—importantly—even though we’ve never said so before, six other circuits have, so that right was clearly established.
That’s it for this week. Please feel free to send this newsletter to any friends or family who might find it interesting. If you got this from a friend, you can sign up to receive future issues here.
When we’re not writing this newsletter, we litigate cases in the federal courts of appeals. If you want to support that important work, you can do so here.
Thanks for reading.