A roundabout way to reject the inmate's appeal

When you go to trial, you are placing your life in the hands of eight jurors that you don't know and will never see again. An experienced lawyer told me that years ago. When cases go to trial and the jury reaches a verdict, the case is pretty much over, even if the losing party takes up an appeal. Appellate courts defer to the jury's judgment, and unless there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the jury's verdict, the Court of Appeals (or the Appellate Division in state court) will not disturb the verdict.

The case is Bradshaw v. Officer Hernandez, a summary order issued on September 24. This case raises a similar issue to what I talked about above. Bradshaw is an inmate. He claims that Hernandez failed to prevent three inmates from attacking him in his cell. That attack injured Bradshaw, who claims Hernandez did not allow for proper medical treatment. He also claims another officer, Alphonse, trapped Bradshaw's hand in the feeding slot of his cell and smacked his hand with a walkie-talkie. The trial court dismissed all claims on the summary judgment motion except for the medical indifference claim against Hernandez, which the jury rejected.

A huge law firm, Kirkland and Ellis, represented Bradshaw at trial, but he's on his own in the Second Circuit. He wisely focuses on the summary judgment ruling on appeal, not bothering with the jury verdict, which he probably knows will be sustained on appeal. At least the summary judgment ruling will be reviewed by the Court of Appeals de novo, which means from scratch. The trial court gets no deference in granting a summary judgment motion. The issue on appeal is whether the trial court properly dismissed the Eighth Amendment claim in which Bradshaw claims that "Hernandez observe[d] plaintiff Bradshaw being attacked by other inmates, ha[d] a realistic opportunity to intervene, and deliberately fail[ed] to take reasonable steps to prevent that attack."

Although the parties did not brief the issue, the Court of Appeals (Katzmann, Chin and Bianco) finds a way to reject the appeal based on the effect of the jury verdict. The Court of Appeals states that "judicial economy counsels against a remand here, especially given the detailed nature of the jury’s special verdict, which was reached after Bradshaw had a full opportunity to be heard." In the end, the Court says, "Bradshaw’s Equal Protection and Eighth Amendment claims against Officer Hernandez were each premised on the common allegation that Officer Hernandez failed to intervene to prevent the November 20, 2015 attack. The jury’s finding that Officer Hernandez did not fail to intervene was fatal to Bradshaw’s Eighth Amendment claim at trial and, as the law of the case, is fatal to Bradshaw’s Equal Protection claim as well." This is a roundabout way to reject Bradshaw's appeal, but it works. The case is over.