Officials granted immunity in suit over man’s death

Where the estate of a man killed by other detainees sued a prison official who admitted that he conducted an improper cell check, but there is no clearly established constitutional right to properly conducted security checks, the guard was entitled to qualified immunity and cannot be held liable on this claim.

Background

John Telly King was murdered by fellow detainees Jacob Philip and Denver Simmons. King’s estate sued the South Carolina Department of Corrections prison guards on duty and their supervisors, alleging that they were deliberately indifferent to King’s safety and medical needs and therefore responsible for his death. A magistrate judge disagreed, granting summary judgment to defendants. The magistrate judge held that defendants were not deliberately indifferent and that, in any event, they were entitled to qualified immunity.

Security check claim

King’s claims that Sergeant McKan was deliberately indifferent to King’s safety by failing to conduct proper security checks. At bottom, King argues that McKan should be held liable because he walked past Simmons’s cell without looking inside despite knowing King faced a substantial risk of inmate violence. But because there is no clearly established constitutional right to properly conducted security checks, McKan is entitled to qualified immunity, and cannot be held liable on this claim.

Medical needs claim

King also claims that McKan and Officer Jones were deliberately indifferent to King’s medical needs when they opened the door to Simmons’s cell, saw four bodies, including King, and called for medical personnel rather than rendering medical assistance themselves. But to repeat, overcoming qualified immunity requires King to show that McKan’s and Jones’s conduct violated a clearly established right.

Rather than claiming that this court’s controlling precedent clearly established that McKan’s and Jones’s conduct violated the Eighth Amendment, King identifies cases from four other circuits holding that an officer is deliberately indifferent when he fails to render aid to a prisoner who appears to be unconscious or dead. He contends that these four cases amount to a “consensus of persuasive authority” clearly establishing that the officers’ actions were unconstitutional.

Those cases do not come close to establishing such a consensus. King’s problem is two-fold. First, two of those cases are distinguishable from the right King claims. That leaves King with two out-of-circuit cases. And while those two cases do hold that King has the right he claims, that’s not enough for a “consensus.” This is all the more true given that other persuasive authorities go the other way. Therefore, McKan and Jones are entitled to qualified immunity.

Supervisory liability

Lastly, King brought a supervisory-liability claim of deliberate indifference against Warden Riley, Associate Wardens Thompson and Lane and Major Jackson. His claim fails because he neglected to allege or produce evidence that any individual defendant violated his rights.

Affirmed.

Dissenting opinion

Wynn, J., dissenting:

There is no dispute that the prison-official defendants knew that the unit housed inmates with severe mental illnesses who, per prison policy, required intensive monitoring; that a number of the inmates were classified as violent offenders; that the inmates had significant latitude to move freely about the unit each day and that the eventual murderers were given positions of authority within the unit, which included the liberty to keep their cell doors unlocked all day long and to store cleaning supplies in their cells.

There is no dispute that the security guard on duty knowingly conducted improper security checks; he admitted to it. And there is no dispute that four horrific murders occurred, and that they went undetected by prison officials for almost three hours until the killers left the unit, walked uninhibited across the prison yard to another building and voluntarily turned themselves in.

In my view, these facts more than suffice to show an Eighth Amendment violation. And yet the majority absolves defendants on qualified-immunity grounds. I must dissent.

King v. Riley, Case No. 22-6410, Aug. 4, 2023. 4th Cir. (Richardson), from DSC at Rock Hill (Gossett). Elizabeth Anne Franklin-Best for Appellant. Claude Eugene Hardin Jr., Daniel C. Plyler and David Allan DeMasters for Appellees. VLW 023-2-207. 36 pp.