"Sotomayor dissents from cert denial in Louisana prisoner rights fight," is the title of Marcia Coyle's post at the National Law Journal Supreme Court Insider.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit took just four sentences to reject a Louisiana prisoner's claim of harsh treatment violating the Eighth Amendment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday took four pages to reject the panel decision and to open a small window into her views on pleading and the Eighth Amendment.
Sotomayor was the sole dissenter from a denial of certiorari in Pitre v. Cain. When Anthony Pitre stopped taking his HIV medication to protest his transfer to a prison facility, he claimed that officials at that prison punished him by subjecting him to hard labor in 100-degree heat. He was rushed to an emergency room twice because the heat exacerbated his medical condition, but, he alleged, prison officials denied his repeated requests for lighter duty.
And:
The 5th Circuit erred in requiring Pitre to produce evidence to support his claim before a responsive pleading was filed, wrote Sotomayor. She cited for support Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, one of two recent Supreme Court decisions significantly altering the pleading standards in civil cases. That error would have been enough to reverse the lower courts, she added, but "more fundamentally" those courts misunderstood the nature of Pitre's Eighth Amendment claim.
The correct question under the Eighth Amendment, said Sotomayor, is to ask whether the officials involved acted with "deliberate indifference" to the inmates' health or safety. "Pitre's complaint alleges that respondents subjected him to labor that they knew posed `a substantial risk of serious harm' to his health notwithstanding his pleas for a more appropriate assignment, and he even attaches a letter from a prison official implying as much. This is more than sufficient to state a claim of deliberate indifference."
She added, "I cannot comprehend how a court could deem such allegations 'frivolous.' "
Related posts in the Fifth Circuit and incarceration indexes.
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