Eleventh Circuit Denies Qualified Immunity to Georgia Jailers Who Housed White Detainee With Black Cellmate Held for Racially Motivated Attack
On January 5, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed a lower court’s finding that defendant guards and a nurse at Georgia’s Muscogee County Jail may have violated the civil rights of a white detainee who was killed after they placed him in a cell with a Black detainee arrested for a racially motivated stabbing. The Court found denial of qualified immunity (QI) was proper because the dead man’s right to protection from reasonably foreseeable risk of harm was clearly established at the time.
During the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis cop in May 2020, Jayvon Hatchett walked into a Columbus AutoZone store and stabbed a white store clerk in the back. The next day, on August 26, 2020, he was arrested for assault; importantly, his arrest report did not mention a possible racial motivation.
But at the jail, Hatchett explained to an intake nurse and guards Antonio Burgess and Keyvon Sellers that he’d committed the assault because he was “just upset” about the injustice shown Floyd and other Black men, declaring that “somebody has to do something.” However, Sellers determined from Hatchett’s then-calm demeanor that he posed no further threat and didn’t mention the racial motivation behind his crime to classification officers, who celled Hatchett with two white men. On September 4, 2020, when finally left alone with just one white cellmate, Eddie Nelson, Hatchett fatally strangled him.
With the aid of Savannah attorney Craig T. Jones, Nelson’s brother, Jerry Nelson, filed suit on behalf of his estate in federal court for the Middle District of Georgia, joined by Nelson’s wife, Michelle Dushane. They accused Burgess, Sellers and nurses employed by jail medical contractor CorrectHealth Muscogee LLC of deliberate indifference to the serious risk of harm that Hatchett posed to Nelson. Defendants moved to dismiss the claims, arguing they were entitled to QI. The district court disagreed and largely denied the motion. Defendants then filed an interlocutory appeal.
The Eleventh Circuit began by asserting it could hear the appeal because “the parties here dispute not only whether the evidence is sufficient to create a jury question about whether Sellers violated Nelson’s constitutional right, but also whether that right was clearly established when Nelson allegedly violated it.” As the Court noted, it has “jurisdiction over both issues.”
The Court then agreed that under the circumstances, Nelson faced “a strong likelihood, rather than a mere possibility” of suffering serious harm from Hatchett, quoting Brown v. Hughes, 894 F.2d 1533 (11th Cir. 1990). “The record establishes more than ‘some unspecified risk of harm,’” the Court continued, quoting Marbury v. Warden, 936 F.3d 1227 (11th Cir. 2019), since “Hatchett’s unprovoked stabbing of a random white man solely because of the man’s race evidenced the deadly risk he posed to a white detainee.”
Sellers argued there was insufficient evidence that he knew of this risk to Nelson, but the Court wasn’t buying that. “Hatchett’s composure” while speaking to the guard “reveals little about Hatchett’s risk to white inmates,” the Court said. Moreover, the Supreme Court of the U.S. “also has expressly rejected the argument that an injured inmate must have ‘expressed’ to prison … officials a ‘concern for his safety,’” as laid out in Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994).
Pointing to its own en banc decision in United States v. Stein, 881 F.3d 853 (11th Cir. 2018), the Court said that “a jury would be free ‘to disregard’ Sellers’s ‘self-serving (and unsupported)’ testimony that he did not perceive Hatchett to pose a risk of violence to a white detainee.” The guard was clearly on notice, the Court said, that it was unconstitutional “not to prevent the placement of a white detainee alone in a cell with another detainee who, the day before, stabbed a stranger solely for being white.”
Thus the district court’s order was affirmed. A request for re-hearing before the entire Eleventh Circuit en banc was denied on February 27, 2024. See: Nelson v. Tompkins, 89 F.4th 1289 (11th Cir. 2024); and 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 4648 (11th Cir.).
The case has now returned to the district court and is moving toward trial in the term beginning in September 2024. PLN will update developments as they are available. See: Nelson v. CorrectHealth Muscogee LLC, USDC (M.D. Ga.), Case No. 4:20-cv-00213.
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login