No immunity for solitary confinement practices

Where detainees at supermax facilities alleged that solitary confinement violated their Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment and their 14th Amendment right to receive sufficient process, prison officials were properly denied qualified immunity at the motion to dismiss stage. The detainees adequately pleaded deliberate indifference and denial of basic due process requirements, like notice and an opportunity to be heard.

Background

In this putative class action, detainees at two of Virginia’s supermax facilities sue the Virginia Department of Corrections and several of its officials for violating their Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment and their 14th Amendment right to receive sufficient process.

The district court denied defendants’ motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim and on grounds of qualified immunity. Defendants now appeal the court’s qualified-immunity rulings as to both claims.

Eighth Amendment

Defendants insist that this court’s case law did not clearly establish until Porter v. Clarke, 923 F.3d 348 (4th Cir. 2019), that solitary confinement in itself can cause severe enough harm to implicate the Eighth Amendment. But they misapprehend the nature of the Eighth Amendment inquiry and with it, Porter’s import.

Eighth Amendment liability comes into play only where a corrections officer appreciates the harm confinement conditions impose yet chooses to disregard it—but qualified immunity does “not allow the official who actually knows that he was violating the law to escape liability for his actions.” Because plaintiffs have adequately pleaded defendants’ deliberate indifference, the district court correctly denied qualified immunity at the motion-to-dismiss stage. And Porter only buttresses that holding as it helps illustrate that the harm to plaintiffs was “obvious”—to explain, that is, why plaintiffs have “plausibly alleged” just such indifference.

Dismissal remains improper so long as the officers’ mental state remains genuinely in issue. Here, defendants’ demur is that they did not know, until this court’s decision in Porter, that the solitary-confinement conditions they promulgated posed “a substantial risk of serious harm” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. They may well end up on the winning side of that argument after the evidence comes in, but for now, these “fact[ual]” issues compel the court to move this case forward, unless defendants’ entitlement to qualified immunity appears on “the face of the complaint.” Far from settling the factual issues in defendants’ favor, however, plaintiffs’ allegations proffer evidence of a culpable mind.

The Eighth Amendment inquiry proceeds in two parts: whether confinement conditions inflict harm that is, “objectively, sufficiently serious” to deprive prisoners of “the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities” and whether officers subjectively acted with “deliberate indifference to inmate health or safety” because they knew of but disregarded the inhumane treatment. Defendants suggest that this court apply qualified immunity to just the first prong, hold that it was not clearly established by 2012 that long-term isolation violated the Eighth Amendment, and dismiss the case before ever reaching the subjective prong.

But such a dissociative approach misconceives the purpose of the objective prong and would crumble foundational qualified-immunity precepts. The court recognizes that the Ninth Circuit takes a different tack, applying qualified immunity separately to each Eighth Amendment prong. But that court’s analysis fails to persuade this court.

According to defendants, however, no reasonable officer would have understood that until Porter decided isolation alone can cause severe injury. This argument suffers from the same flaw as defendants’ call to sever the two Eighth Amendment prongs: It overlooks the fact that Eighth Amendment liability hinges on whether an officer deliberately ignores the harms confinement conditions cause.

Due process

Due process entails a two-part inquiry: (1) whether plaintiffs had a protectable liberty interest in avoiding security detention and (2) whether defendants failed to afford minimally adequate process to protect that liberty interest.

On the first prong, Supreme Court cases dating back to at least 2005 held materially indistinguishable conditions trigger 14th Amendment protections. As to the second, this court has yet to determine the exact review due to prisoners in long-term solitary confinement. But plaintiffs allege defendants failed to meet even the most basic due process requirements like notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard and that the criteria defendants employ to assess solitary placements are entirely divorced from legitimate penological interests. On those allegations—and at this litigation stage—defendants cannot claim immunity.

Affirmed.

Thorpe v. Clarke, Case No. 21-1714, June 14, 2022. 4th Cir. (Floyd), from WDVA at Big Stone Gap (Jones). Margaret Hoehl O’Shea for Appellants. Vishal Mahendra Agraharkar and Andrei Alexander Popovici for Appellees. VLW 022-2-144. 37 pp.