Jose Garza v. City of Donna
Opinion
On February 19, 2016, in a detention facility operated by the Donna Police Department in Donna, Texas, Jose Luis Garza died by suicide. His estate and survivors brought this suit under
I
In the early morning of February 19, 2016, officers of the Donna Police Department ("DPD") responded to a 911 call by Veronica Garza. Her call concerned her son, Jose Luis Garza, who was heavily intoxicated and arguing with his brother at the family's home. Officer Mario Silva was the first to respond at around 5:40 AM, with two other DPD officers soon joining. Veronica told officers that "I feared for his life" and "I'm afraid of him hurting himself." Officer Silva arrested Jose Luis Garza for "assault by threat" and transported *631 him to DPD's facility. Though called a "jail," the district court clarified that it is "a short-term holding facility where-unlike a county jail or state prison-detainees do not stay long." Officer Silva booked Garza into the jail and placed him in a cell just after 6 AM. Officer Silva took no particular mental-health precautions when he brought Garza to the jail.
Garza was placed in a cell that contained a camera, and some time after 8 AM, he obscured the camera's lens. A DPD employee, Minerva Perez, was tasked with monitoring the jail's camera feeds under the jail's written policy. Her shift had begun at 6 AM, and during the morning, she answered 911 calls, one of her other duties. She did not notice that Garza had blocked the camera in his cell. She would later assert that, once jailers arrived to start their shifts, it was their responsibility to monitor the jail's inmates.
Those jailers were Esteban Garza-no relation to the decedent-and Nathan Coronado, who started their shifts at 8 AM. The jailers heard Garza banging on his cell door and making other noise to get their attention. It is disputed whether Garza's noisemaking prompted the jailers to check on him. The jail's written policy required hourly cell checks. The jail's log showed a check was done at 8:10 AM, though the check was not recorded contemporaneously. 1 After that point, the jailers worked on signs that DPD's police chief, Ruben De Leon, directed them to put up in the jail. One read "Welcome to Donna Hilton," 2 and another showed the logo of the Punisher, a comic-book character known for carrying out vigilante justice. Occupied with the signs, the jailers missed that Garza had hanged himself, and it took the chance arrival of agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for Garza's suicide to be discovered. The ICE agents had arrived at 8:40 AM and found him at 8:49 AM. It was unclear how long he had been hanging.
Once Garza was discovered hanging, roughly two minutes passed before Lieutenant Rene Rosas and Captain Ricardo Suarez of DPD began performing CPR on him. During this time, emergency help was called, and it arrived in the form of Hidalgo County emergency medical technician Frank Tafolla. Rosas and Suarez had vigorously performed CPR in the interim, but they did not answer Tafolla's questions about what had happened to Garza. Consequently, Tafolla, who transported Garza to the hospital, lacked information to relay to hospital staff upon arrival. Garza was pronounced dead at the hospital at 9:12 AM.
This lawsuit against the City of Donna via
*632 on Garza but allegedly did not relate information to Tafolla, the EMT; and the police chief, Ruben De Leon, whose instruction to install the "Donna Hilton" and Punisher signs had allegedly occupied the two jailers' attention that morning. The district court rejected each proposed basis for municipal liability and granted summary judgment to the City, from which this appeal arises.
II
Summary judgment is appropriate if "the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law." Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a). We review the district court's decision de novo, applying the same legal standard used by the district court.
Hyatt v. Thomas
,
III
"The constitutional rights of a pretrial detainee ... flow from both the procedural and substantive due process guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment."
Hare v. City of Corinth, Miss.
,
A municipality may be liable under
Appellants presented a conditions theory and numerous episodic-act theories to the district court, all of which were rejected. We take each in turn.
A
In a case challenging conditions of confinement, "the proper inquiry is whether those conditions amount to punishment of the detainee."
Bell
,
*633
and must cause the inmate's constitutional deprivation.
Appellants' conditions theory centers on the signs that Ruben De Leon, DPD's police chief, ordered installed in the jail. Those signs, as noted, bore the message "Welcome to Donna Hilton" and the Punisher logo, respectively, and Jailers Garza and Coronado were assembling them at the critical time on February 19. Appellants view the Donna Hilton sign as "mockingly invok[ing] the torture of POWs." Donna officials venture a positive interpretation of the sign. De Leon said he "wanted buy in from the jailers and the staff to remember that we're here to serve-the people who come in, some people call them prisoners. I call them customers." Robert Calloway, a Texas Ranger who investigated Garza's death, saw it as a reference to the Vietnam POW camp, as Appellants do.
Appellants view the Punisher logo as "favorably advocat[ing] vigilante violence." At summary judgment, Appellants argued at length for a "link between Punisher imagery and abusive police behavior." Among other sources, they relied on a dissenting opinion in a recent Eighth Circuit case, which, citing Wikipedia, explained that the Punisher was an "antihero" figure "created by Marvel Comics in 1974 as an antagonist to Spider-Man," who "considers killing, kidnapping, extortion, coercion, threats of violence, and torture to be acceptable crime fighting tactics."
Sitzes v. City of West Memphis, Ark.
,
In Appellants' view, the signs, taken together, announce an "official policy of prisoner mistreatment" or "official encouragement of intentional mistreatment of detainees." They argue that the signs should thus be categorized as a "condition" of the confinement to which Garza was subjected. The signs "served no valid governmental purpose," and their installation caused Garza's constitutional deprivation because it preoccupied Jailers Garza and Coronado to the detriment of their core duties.
The district court declined to consider Appellants' suit as a conditions-of-confinement case. It cited several similar jail-suicide cases that our court elected to treat as episodic-act cases, rather than conditions cases.
See
Anderson v. Dallas County, Tex.
,
Appellants' conditions theory is an effort to fit a square peg into a round hole. Prior conditions cases have concerned durable restraints or impositions on inmates' lives like overcrowding, deprivation of phone or mail privileges, the use of disciplinary
*634
segregation, or excessive heat.
See
Yates v. Collier
,
B
To establish municipal liability in an episodic-act case, a plaintiff must show "(1) that the municipal employee violated the pretrial detainee's clearly established constitutional rights with subjective deliberate indifference; and (2) that this violation resulted from a municipal policy or custom adopted and maintained with objective deliberate indifference."
Brumfield v. Hollins
,
The district court's analysis focused on the first prong of the episodic-act framework as applied to each employee whose conduct Appellants put in question, scrutinizing the employee's knowledge and state of mind. The district court's formulation of "subjective deliberate indifference" was central to its rulings. The district court defined "subjective deliberate indifference" as follows: "a plaintiff must show that public officers were [1] aware of facts from which an inference of a substantial risk of serious harm to an individual could be drawn; [2] that they actually drew the inference; and [3] that their response indicates subjective intention that the harm occur." The district court drew this quote from
Sanchez v. Young County, Tex.
,
The district court's "intention" requirement, though taken from statements in decisions of our court, is contrary to the weight of our case law and to the Supreme Court precedent from which our cases flow. Our court has based its Fourteenth Amendment case law concerning pretrial detainees on the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment precedent concerning prisoners.
See
Hare
,
Farmer
therefore provides the first two elements of the deliberate-indifference standard applied by the district court, but not its third, that there be a "subjective intention that the harm occur." This third element elevates the required showing beyond what
Farmer
directed to a level that
Farmer
expressly distinguished. The district court's cited authority for this element,
Sanchez v. Young County
, relied on
Thompson v. Upshur County, Tex.
,
We share the concern of the Seventh Circuit that the Farmer standard not be transmuted into a negligence inquiry. "Deliberate indifference, i.e. , the subjective intent to cause harm , cannot be inferred from a prison guard's failure to act reasonably. It if it could, the standard applied would be more akin to negligence than deliberate indifference."
Though "subjective intention" and its variants have occasionally appeared in our decisions beyond the aforementioned instances,
5
far more often we adhere to
*636
Farmer
's formulation: "the official knows of and disregards an excessive risk to inmate safety."
Though we cannot fault a district court that followed statements we have previously made, we cannot endorse an analysis that departed from controlling Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit law. We can, however, "affirm on any ground raised below and supported by the record, even if the district court did not reach it."
Williams v. J.B. Hunt Transp., Inc.
,
*637
As explained above, to establish municipal liability based on an employee's episodic act or omission, a plaintiff must show the violation "resulted from a municipal policy or custom adopted and maintained with objective deliberate indifference."
Brumfield
,
Assuming Ruben De Leon was a final policymaking authority for the City, Appellants must show a policy or custom of his that was the moving force for the episodic acts or omissions of DPD employees.
James v. Harris County
,
Appellants do not attribute the actions of the arresting officer, Silva, or the senior officers who performed CPR, Rosas and Suarez, to any particular policy or custom. What they argue for Silva, Rosas, and Suarez is that De Leon's order to post the "Welcome to Donna Hilton" and "Punisher" signs announced an official policy of detainee mistreatment. The import of the signs is too general and inexact for the signs to constitute the sort of specific directive required for municipal liability, and it is too nebulous to constitute a moving force. The episodic acts or omissions of these employees therefore cannot be attributed to the City.
Appellants say Minerva Perez displayed "utter confusion" about her responsibility to monitor the jail's camera feeds, invoking the failure-to-train principles articulated by
City of Canton v. Harris
. "Under
Canton
, when a municipal entity enacts a facially valid policy but fails to train its employees to implement it in a constitutional manner, that failure constitutes 'official policy' that can support municipal liability if it 'amounts to deliberate indifference.' "
Littell v. Houston Indep. Sch. Dist.
,
Appellants put forward no evidence of a pattern of violations stemming from deficient training, so their case depends on the single-incident method of demonstrating deliberate indifference. As we have emphasized, deliberate indifference may be inferred this way "only in narrow and extreme circumstances," and decisions by our court drawing the inference are rare.
Littell
,
Of the jailers, Esteban Garza and Coronado, Appellants note their preoccupation on February 19 with installing signs in the jail, to the detriment of their job duties, and they attribute the jailers' distraction to the directive from De Leon to install the signs. It is true that a decision to adopt "a course of action tailored to a particular situation" by a municipal government's authorized decisionmaker may constitute an official policy.
Pembaur
,
In sum, whatever we may think of the various DPD employees' actions on February 19, 2016, Appellants have not set forth evidence by which those actions might reasonably be attributed to the City. Accordingly, the City is entitled to judgment as a matter of law, making the district court's grant of summary judgment to the City the correct outcome on this record.
IV
For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM.
Jailer Garza added the 8:10 AM check to the jail's cell-check log after Garza's death and after the Texas Rangers concluded their post-incident investigation. The actual occurrence of the check is thus a sharply contested fact issue.
Appellants interpret the "Donna Hilton" sign as a reference to the notorious Vietnam POW camp, the so-called "Hanoi Hilton."
The district court did go a step beyond our precedent by asserting that our court "uniformly" holds that jail-suicide cases are to be decided on an episodic-act basis. In a recent case, we allowed that a jail suicide might give rise to a conditions theory.
Sanchez
,
See
Garza v. City of Donna
,
See
Brown v. Strain
,
In these cases, unlike in the district court's decision here, the "subjective intent" prong has typically not played a central role. In
Brown
, the interlocutory posture did not confer jurisdiction to review the factual record of deliberate indifference.
See
However one might square the passing remark in
Hare
with the standard that case announced, our 2015 en banc decision in
Williams v. Hampton
was unambiguous. The majority and dissenting opinions agreed that
Farmer
's "knows and disregards" formulation governed.
See
See
Leite v. Bergeron
,
Reference
- Full Case Name
- Jose Luis GARZA, Individually and as Representatives of the Estate of Jose Luis Garza, Jr., Deceased; Veronica Garza, Individually and as Representatives of the Estate of Jose Luis Garza, Jr., Deceased; Cynthia Lopez, as Next Friend of Jose Ruben Garza, Minor Son, Plaintiffs-Appellants v. CITY OF DONNA, Defendant-Appellee
- Cited By
- 122 cases
- Status
- Published