California prison officials cannot escape a lawsuit demanding they pay for allegedly causing a Covid outbreak at San Quentin prison in 2020, resulting in 26 deaths, a federal appeals panel has ruled, declaring the family of a deceased inmate can continue pressing their claims that the state officials violated inmates’ constitutional rights by allegedly willfully exposing them to the virus.
On Oct. 3, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the attempt by the state of California and a collection of correctional officials to dismiss the lawsuit brought by Jacqueline Hampton, whose husband, Michael, died in 2020 after contracting Covid.
According to the court decision, Michael Hampton was imprisoned at San Quentin in May 2020.
At that time, despite outbreaks of the virus in jails and prisons throughout the spring at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, San Quentin was still reporting zero cases of Covid.
However, that changed within days after California prison officials ordered a transfer of inmates from the California Institution for Men (CIM) to San Quentin, even though CIM was in the midst of a Covid outbreak.
Allegedly, the transfer was ordered in an attempt to protect otherwise healthy-seeming inmates from infection.
However, within days of arrival, a group of those transferred inmates allegedly began exhibiting symptoms, and within three weeks, at least 500 inmates had tested positive for Covid.
Correctional officers and other staff at the prison also were infected.
By the end of the San Quentin outbreak, more than 2,000 inmates had been infected, and 25 inmates and one prison guard had died from the disease.
In Hampton’s lawsuit, she alleged the prison officials involved in the transfer and other decisions related to the management of Covid outbreaks in California’s prison system should be held accountable for the deaths of her husband and others.
Specifically, she alleged the knowing transfers of inmates who had been exposed to Covid at CIM to San Quentin prison, in which no known cases of Covid existed should be considered a violation of the Eighth Amendment rights of the San Quentin inmates to be free from cruel and unusual punishments.
In response, the state and the prison officials sought to dismiss the lawsuit, asserting they should be protected by the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which is afforded under state law to public officials acting in their official capacities. They also argued they should be immune to the lawsuit as public safety officers acting under federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act to control the spread of a pandemic-level virus.
While the officials’ arguments persuaded a lower court judge, the Ninth Circuit appellate judges rejected those immunity claims, saying Hampton’s lawsuit should be allowed to go forward.
The judges said the evidence presented thus far shows the prison officials were aware of the outbreak at CIM at the time of the transfer, and may have been aware that Covid tests performed on the 122 inmates transferred to San Quentin were far enough out of date to make them inapplicable to any medical decision making.
Further, the judges said the prison officials had more work to do to defeat Hampton’s claims under the Eighth Amendment that the correctional officials violated inmates’ Eighth Amendment rights to be protected from known infectious diseases.
They noted other prior cases had established a right for inmates to sue if they are knowingly placed in a cell with a prolific smoker, for instance, or if correctional officers refuse to protect inmates from violence at the hands of other inmates.
In this instance, they said, prison officials should have known for months that transferring inmates who may be infected with Covid to a prison in which there were no known cases could result in potential legal liability.
Hampton, they said, “is not required to point to a prior case holding that prison officials can violate the Eighth Amendment by transferring inmates from one prison to another during a global pandemic,” the judges wrote. “Binding caselaw ‘need not catalogue every way in which’ prison conditions can be constitutionally inadequate ‘for us to conclude that a reasonable official would understand that his actions violated’ an inmate’s rights.”
The opinion was authored by Ninth Circuit Judge Michelle T. Friedland, with concurrence from Circuit Judge Mark J. Bennett and U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett.
Judge Richard Bennett was sitting on the panel on special designation from the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
Hampton has been represented by attorneys Michael J. Haddad, Julia Sherwin and Teresa Allen, of the firm of Haddad & Sherwin, of Oakland; and Brian Hawkinson, of Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, of San Francisco.