The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by California prison officials seeking immunity from lawsuits over their transfer of inmates with COVID-19 to San Quentin in May 2020, sparking an outbreak that killed 26 inmates and a guard.
The judges denied the appeals without comment or disagreement.
The transfer decision was later criticized by state lawmakers as a “fiasco,” “abhorrent,” and “the worst prison health mistake in state history.”
The California Institution for Men in Chino had been hit hard by COVID-19. Nine of its inmates had died and about 600 were infected as of May 2020.
San Quentin then had no known cases at the time. In an effort to prevent further damage to CIM, prison officials decided to move 122 inmates from Chino north to San Quentin.
Within days, San Quentin reported 25 COVID cases among the 122 new arrivals. Within three weeks, the virus spread to another 499 people.
By early September, at least 2,100 inmates and 270 staff members had tested positive.
The state now faces four major lawsuits from the families of those who died, as well as inmates and staff who were infected but survived.
Those lawsuits can proceed now that federal courts in California and the Supreme Court have denied the state's claim that correctional officers had “qualified immunity” that protected them from being sued.
“The state has had its due process until reaching the Supreme Court. They don't get caught up in a technicality,” Michael J. Haddad, the families' attorney, said in response to the court's order. “Now is the time to face the facts. “Prison administrators killed 29 people in what the Ninth Circuit called a ‘textbook case’ of deliberate indifference.”
The defense of qualified immunity often protects police officers from lawsuits. Judges have said police and other government officials can be sued for violating people's constitutional rights, but only if they knowingly violated a “clearly established” right.
Courts have said that police officers often must make split-second decisions about whether, for example, a pursued suspect has a gun. For that reason, courts sometimes protect officers from being sued for “unreasonable seizure” if an officer shoots a fleeing person based on the mistaken belief that the suspect was armed.
The pending prison cases are quite different, the families' lawyers said, because prison officials decided to carry out the transfers without taking the precautions that were understood to be necessary at the time.
Sergeant. Gilbert Polanco, the deceased guard, was 55 years old and had worked at San Quentin for more than two decades. He had multiple health conditions, including obesity, diabetes and hypertension, which put him at high risk if he contracted COVID-19.
His duties during the pandemic included taking sick inmates to local hospitals, but attorneys said corrections officials refused to provide him or the inmates with personal protective equipment.
At the end of June 2020, he contracted COVID-19 and, after a long stay in hospital, died in August.
In Polanco's case, the lawsuit alleges that he lost his life due to a “danger created by the State.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said that corrections officials had affirmatively exposed Polanco to a danger he would not otherwise have faced and had failed to take steps to protect him from the danger they had created.
In the past, the Supreme Court had also ruled that prisoners have the right to be protected from “unnecessary and senseless pain,” even as a result of “deliberate indifference to their serious medical needs.” Lawyers for San Quentin inmates said prison officials can be held responsible by that standard.
California state prosecutors urged the Supreme Court to review and reverse Ninth Circuit decisions that rejected a qualified immunity defense for correctional officers.
“The facts of these cases are undeniably tragic,” they said. But in “the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the disease and testing supplies were limited, the accused officials attempted to protect the lives of dozens of vulnerable inmates who were confined to a prison. where the virus was rampant. .”
In retrospect, they agreed that their actions could be considered wrong, but “no clearly established law warned them that their alleged mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic at San Quentin prison was unconstitutional.”
