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A defendant whose cell water was shut off for more than a week failed to prove that the two prison employees he sued knew that the water did not need to be shut off, a split Court of Appeals of Indiana has ruled.
But a dissenting judge would reverse the dismissal of the inmate’s complaint.
In December 2022, inmate Asher Hill filed a lawsuit against Department of Correction employees Sgt. B. Vaughn and K. Chesterfield.
Hill alleged Chesterfield shut off the water to his cell, with Chesterfield claiming another inmate had threatened to “flood the range.” But a maintenance worker told Hill his water didn’t need to be shut off because the cells have separate valves.
Hill went without water in his cell from March 29, 2021, to April 9, 2021, causing waste to accumulate in his toilet. Eventually, Hill said he held his bowels and bladder to the point where he suffered severe headaches and stomachaches.
The smell also nauseated Hill, and he could not finish his meals most of the time. He ultimately had to get water from another inmate.
When Hill asked other correctional officers to turn his water back on, he was told that Vaughn ordered them not to.
Due to Hill being incarcerated, the Sullivan circuit Court was supposed to “docket the case and take no further action” until it reviewed the complaint. But the appellate court found that the trial court failed to conduct that review and instead had the complaint served on the defendants.
After two months, the defendants hadn’t answered or otherwise responded to Hill’s complaint, so Hill filed a motion for default judgment. The court failed to rule on that motion within 30 days, so the assigned judge was removed from the case and a special judge was appointed.
The special judge conducted the review of the complaint and concluded that while the defendants seemed to not have much knowledge of the plumbing around Hill’s cell, none of the acts were criminal, malicious, willful and wanton, outside the scope of their employment or calculated to benefit them personally.
The court thus dismissed Hill’s complaint and denied his motion for default judgment.
On appeal, Hill claimed that the trial court erred by dismissing his complaint and denying his motion for default judgment.
The appellate court disagreed, finding Hill did not allege that the defendants were aware that his cell eventually became unlivable and that they knew it was unnecessary and turned his water off anyway.
“… (T)he complaint is simply devoid of any allegations that Chesterfield and Vaughn — the only named defendants — knew that Hill’s water didn’t need to be turned off in the first place, that it remained off for a long period, or that Hill’s cell eventually became unlivable,” Judge Nancy Vaidik wrote.
Judge Cale Bradford concurred with the majority opinion, but Judge Eliane Brown wrote a separate dissenting opinion.
Brown noted the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding that pro se pleadings are “to be liberally construed.”
“The Court also held that a pro se complaint, however inartfully pleaded, must be held to less stringent standards than formal pleadings drafted by lawyers and can only be dismissed for failure to state a claim if it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief,” Brown wrote.
But according to the majority, which cited Zavodnik v. Harper, 17 N.E.3d 259 (Ind. 2014), “that is not the law in Indiana.”
Brown also opined that the trial court erred by dismissing Hill’s complaint.
“Under these circumstances, taking the allegations in Hill’s complaint to be true, and viewing the pleadings in a light most favorable to Hill as the nonmoving party with every reasonable inference construed in his favor, I would find that Hill proffered sufficient facts to show that his water was turned off for multiple days leading to deprivations serious enough to implicate Eighth Amendment protections and that the reasonable inference of his allegations is that Chesterfield and Sgt. Vaughn had knowledge of the conditions,” she wrote.
Responding to Brown, the majority wrote that a “‘sufficiently serious’ deprivation is only the first showing that must be made by a prisoner claiming a conditions-of-confinement violation under the Eighth Amendment. … The prisoner must also allege and show that the named defendants acted with a ‘sufficiently culpable state of mind.’ And that’s where Hill’s complaint fails.”
The case is Asher B. Hill v. K. Chesterfield and Sgt. B. Vaughn, 23A-CT-1649.
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