Jury verdict in inmate's favor is reversed on appeal

A federal jury in Albany awarded this inmate-plaintiff $20,000 in damages for pain and suffering resulting from bad jail conditions that included cell overcrowding and threats of violence/lack of safe living conditions. That verdict is now gone, the victim of both the Prison Litigation Reform Act and qualified immunity.

The case is Walker v. Schult, issued on August 16. We have a series of holdings to explain why the jury's findings are not enough to support the verdict. This case is complex, which explains why it took the Second Circuit (Kearse, Lynch and Chin) over a year to resolve the appeal following oral argument.

1. While the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, overcrowded cells by themselves are not enough to violate the Constitution unless the overcrowding is accompanied by some treatment that deprives the inmates of the minimal civilized measure of life's necessities. That rule derives from a Supreme Court case, Rhodes v. Chapman (1981). The idea is that the Constitution does not mandate comfortable prisons. 

2. Further complicating things for plaintiff is the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, when Congress decided to scale back inmate lawsuits by imposing certain procedural and substantive conditions for victory. One such limitation is that inmates cannot recover damages for pain and suffering without some showing of physical injury resulting from those conditions. The jury in this case was not instructed about that legal principle, as the trial court apparently thought the federal defendants had waived that defense; in fact, the Second Circuit says, plaintiff and his lawyers should've seen this defense coming in light of the procedural history of this case, and the "limitation on recovery" defense is not the kind of affirmative defense that a party can waive. This means the jury should have been instructed on the principle that the inmate plaintiff cannot win without a showing of physical injury. And since there was no such showing, the verdict is vacated and the inmate loses.

3. What is more, the federal defendants are entitled to qualified immunity, which preludes any liability when the plaintiff proceeds on a legal claim that is not clearly-established under prior Second Circuit and Supreme Court case law. You may have come across commentary over the last few years on this kind of immunity, which makes it difficult for civil rights plaintiffs to win their cases. There was hope that the Supreme Court or even Congress might do something about qualified immunity, but for now this immunity is here to stay, a mainstay of federal civil rights law since the 1960s. On the factual findings reached by the jury, particularly that all plaintiff was able to prove was overcrowding and threats of violence, the federal defendants are immune from suit. The trial judge should have recognized that once the verdict came in with the jury's factual findings, but it failed to do so. Since there is no case that says the inmate can win an Eighth Amendment case solely on the basis of overcrowding, qualified immunity attaches, and plaintiff loses.