Finley v. Huss

TIMOTHY FINLEY #266147, Plaintiff, v. ERICA HUSS, et al., Defendants.

No. 2:18-CV-100

United States District Court, W.D. Michigan, Northern Division

December 30, 2022

ORDER ADOPTING REPORT AND RECOMMENDATION

GORDON J. QUIST, UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE.

This is a civil rights action brought by state prisoner, Timothy Finley, pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983. United States Magistrate Judge Maarten Vermaat issued a thorough 46-page Report and Recommendation (R & R), recommending that the Court grant Defendants' motion for summary judgment and grant in part and deny in part Finley's motion to unseal. (ECF No. 100.) Finley has filed objections. (ECF No. 104.) Defendants have responded. (ECF No. 105.) Both parties filed supplemental briefs (ECF Nos. 110 and 111.)

Upon receiving objections to the R & R, the district judge “shall make a de novo determination of those portions of the report or specified proposed findings or recommendations to which objection is made.” 28 U.S.C § 636(b)(1). This Court may accept, reject, or modify any or all of the magistrate judge's findings or recommendations. 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1); Fed.R.Civ.P 72(b). After conducting a de novo review of the R & R the objections, and the pertinent portions of the record, the Court concludes that the R & R should be adopted.

Finley alleges that Defendants violated his rights by placing him in administrative segregation instead of transferring him to a mental health unit. Specifically, he alleges that Defendants (1) were deliberately indifferent to his serious medical issues and subjected him to cruel and unusual conditions of confinement, in violation of the Eighth Amendment; (2) violated his rights to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment during the hearings that resulted in his placement in administrative segregation; and (3) denied him services offered by the prison, in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act (RA). In the R & R, the magistrate judge summarized his recommendations as follows:

The undersigned is aware of the difficulties prison officials face when deciding how to manage a mentally ill prisoner who is engaging in self-harm while also failing to follow prison rules. Nevertheless, as an initial matter, the undersigned concludes that there are genuine issues of fact as to Finley's Eighth Amendment claim. Finley's well-documented history of mental illness and self-mutilation triggers a genuine issue as the objective component of these Eighth Amendment claims; and Defendants' decisions to classify Finley into administrative segregation despite Finley's history is sufficient to create a genuine issue as to the subjective component. The undersigned concludes however, that there are no genuine issues of fact as to Finley's Fourteenth Amendment claim or his ADA and RA disability discrimination claims. Based on the undisputed evidence, no liberty interest is implicated to establish a cognizable Fourteenth Amendment claim. Furthermore, the record before the Court indicates that Finley did receive due process regarding his SCC hearings, at least as to the September 27, 2016 hearing. But, regardless of these conclusions, the undersigned finds that Defendants' decisions with regard to handling a mentally ill prisoner who has also violated prison rules on numerous occasions are protected by the doctrine of qualified immunity. Finley's constitutional claims are barred because there is no controlling authority nor sufficiently robust agreement amongst persuasive authorities that would inform reasonable prison officials that classifying a mentally ill prisoner into administrative segregation is unconstitutional.

(ECF No. 100 at PageID.1590.)

In his objections, Finley argues that the magistrate judge erred in recommending that Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity because no reasonable prison official would think it constitutionally permissible to put a mentally ill prisoner in administrative segregation that is likely to cause him psychiatric harm. The magistrate judge correctly framed the issue: “whether, at the time of the Defendants' conduct, it was clearly established that a mentally ill prisoner had a right to not be placed into administrative segregation.” (Id. at PageID.1627.) In his summary judgment response, Finley argued that the law was clearly established based on (1) specific United States Supreme Court precedents establish the required settled law; (2) specific Sixth Circuit precedents establish the required settled law; (3) a consensus of persuasive authorities establishes the required settled law; and (4) the MDOC policies gave fair warning to a reasonable person about the unconstitutional nature of Defendants' conduct. The magistrate judge rejected each of Finley's arguments. Despite Finley's arguments to the contrary, neither the United States Supreme Court nor the Sixth Circuit have specifically addressed whether placing a mentally ill person in administrative segregation and holding him there amounts to an Eighth Amendment violation. Moreover, the cases from other circuits are not directly on point, and the MDOC regulations do not alter the magistrate judge's analysis.

Finley also cites two recent Supreme Court decisions in his supplemental brief-Taylor v. Riojas, __ U.S. __, 141 S.Ct. 52 (2020) (per curiam), and McCoy v. Alamu, 141 S.Ct. 1364 (2021). Finley contends that Taylor and McCoy highlighted the vitality of the “obvious violation” doctrine. The Sixth Circuit has stated that these cases stand for the proposition that “when the conduct of a government official is so egregious that a constitutional violation is apparent, the Supreme Court does not require that a case be ‘directly on point' to satisfy the ‘clearly established' prong of the qualified-immunity analysis.” Burnett v Griffith, 33 F.4th 907, 914 (6th Cir. 2022). Both Taylor and McCoy involved particularly egregious facts. In Taylor, an inmate was forced to endure six days in two different feces-covered cells without clothing or a bed. 141 S.Ct. at 53. In McCoy, a corrections officer sprayed an inmate with pepper spray without provocation. See McCoy v. Alamu, 950 F.3d 226, 231 (5th Cir. 2020), vacated by, 141 S.Ct. 1364 (2021). Unlike the...