Hallam v. Wall et al

Filing 43

ORDER terminating 11 Motion to Dismiss for Failure to State a Claim; denying 19 Motion to Dismiss for Failure to State a Claim. So Ordered by Chief Judge William E. Smith on 11/30/2018. (Jackson, Ryan)

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
DISTRICT OF RHODE ISLAND
______________________________
)
PAUL R. HALLAM II,
)
)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
C.A. No. 18-50-WES
)
Ashbel T. WALL, Director of
)
Rhode Island Department of
)
Corrections; JUSTIN AMARAL,
)
Lieutenant at Rhode Island
)
Department of Corrections;
)
and JEFFERY ACETO, Warden at )
Rhode Island Department of
)
Corrections,
)
)
Defendants.
)
______________________________)
ORDER
WILLIAM E. SMITH, Chief Judge.
Before the Court is Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss Amended
Complaint (ECF No. 19) (“Defendants’ Motion”), to which Plaintiff
filed

an

objection

(ECF

No.

34).

For

the

following

reasons,

Defendants’ Motion is denied.
I.

Factual Background
This case arises out of a disciplinary incident which occurred

while

Plaintiff

was

Institution (“ACI”).

incarcerated

at

the

Adult

Correctional

According to Plaintiff, on April 5, 2017,

Defendant Amaral, a corrections officer, acting without provocation
or justification, doused Plaintiff with an entire can of industrialgrade pepper spray and then placed him into solitary confinement,

without giving Plaintiff an opportunity to decontaminate.

(Am.

Compl. ¶¶ 13-16, ECF No. 16.) To justify this abusive behavior,
Defendant Amaral then “booked” Plaintiff for two infractions, both
of which were subsequently dismissed as unfounded. (Id. ¶¶ 17-18.)
According to Plaintiff, Defendant Amaral had no legitimate basis for
using pepper spray against him and his decision to “empty[] the
entire canister and drench[] [Plaintiff] in caustic chemicals was
purely

sadistic.”

(Id.

¶

19.)

Plaintiff

also

claims

that

he

complained repeatedly to Rhode Island Department of Corrections
(“RIDOC”) staff about his need to receive medical attention for the
deleterious effects of the pepper spray, but that his “medical needs
were decidedly ignored by medical staff at the facility.” (Id. ¶
20.)

Plaintiff alleges that

RIDOC’s willful ignorance

of his

condition caused him to be rushed to Rhode Island Hospital, where he
received emergency surgery and an extended stay in the Intensive
Care Unit. (Id. ¶¶ 21-22.)
The Complaint includes three counts.

Count I is brought under

42 U.S.C. § 1983 and alleges that Defendant Amaral used excessive
force in violation of Plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment rights when he
doused Plaintiff in pepper spray. (Id. ¶¶ 23-24.) Count II is also
brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and claims that Plaintiff’s detention
in solitary confinement violated his due process rights under the
Fourteenth Amendment.

(Id. ¶ 25.)

2

Count III alleges that Defendant

Amaral’s actions amounted to assault and battery causing severe and
lasting physical injuries and mental anguish. (Id. ¶¶ 26-28.)
Defendants have moved to dismiss Count II of the Complaint1,
alleging that Plaintiff’s placement in solitary confinement does not
constitute an “atypical and significant hardship” and, therefore,
does not amount to a violation of his due process rights. (Defs.’
Mot. 7 (citing Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472, 484 (1995)).)

In

response, Plaintiff argues that “for the inmate to be framed and
thrown into solitary confinement on a false pretextual basis with no
meaningful opportunity to decontaminate following the excessive and
unwarranted dousing in caustic chemicals” must clearly constitute an
“atypical hardship” in that it is a “dramatic departure from ordinary
prison life, as required under Sandin.” (Pl.’s Mem. in Supp. of Obj.
2-3, ECF No. 34.)
II.

Applicable Law
In ruling on a motion to dismiss, the Court must “accept the

well-pleaded facts as true, viewing factual allegations in the light
most favorable to the plaintiff.” Rederford v. US Airways, Inc., 589

Defendants initially sought dismissal of Plaintiff’s Count I
as well, arguing that none of the Defendants had been served in their
individual capacities and, therefore, they were not subject to suit
under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. See Will v. Michigan, 491 U.S. 58, 71 (1989)
(“[N]either a State nor its officials acting in their official
capacities are ‘persons’ under § 1983.”). However, Defendants have
since stipulated that they were properly served in their individual
capacities on August 20, 2018. As such, the Court denies Defendants’
Motion to Dismiss Count I as moot. (See Joint Stip. as to Defs.’
Mot. to Dismiss, ECF No. 29.)
1

3

F.3d 30, 35 (1st Cir. 2009).

“To survive a motion to dismiss, a

complaint must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true,
to ‘state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.’ . . . A
claim has facial plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual
content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that
the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.” Ashcroft v.
Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009) (quoting Bell Atlantic Corp. v.
Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 556, 570 (2007)).
In the context of inmates’ rights, the Due Process Clause will
not be implicated unless a Complaint plausibly alleges the loss of
a liberty interest based on the “impos[ition of] [an] atypical and
significant hardship on the inmate in relation to the ordinary
incidents of prison life.” Sandin, 515 U.S. at 484.
III. Analysis
The Supreme Court has held that placement in disciplinary
segregation, without more, is not sufficient to implicate a liberty
interest. See Id. at 485; see also Pona v. Weeden, C.A. No. 16-612S,
2017

WL

3279012,

at

*1

(D.R.I.

June

29,

2017),

Report

and

Recommendation adopted, C.A. No. 16-612 S, 2017 WL 3278874 (D.R.I.
Aug. 1, 2017).

This is so because “[d]iscipline by prison officials

in response to a wide range of misconduct falls within the expected
perimeters of the sentence imposed by a court of law.”
U.S. at 485.

Sandin, 515

As such, disciplinary segregation only implicates a

liberty interest if placement lasts for an extremely long time, see

4

Arauz v. Bell, 307 Fed. Appx. 923, 930 (6th Cir. 2009) (inmate placed
in segregation for 693 days), or if the conditions of segregated
confinement present a “dramatic departure from the basic conditions
of [the inmate’s] sentence,” see Wilkinson v. Austin, 545 U.S. 209,
222 (2005) (quoting Sandin, 515 U.S. at 485); see also Harden-Bey v.
Rutter, 524 F.3d 789, 792 (6th Cir. 2008) (“In deciding whether
changes

to

an

inmate's

conditions

of

confinement

implicate

a

cognizable liberty interest, both Sandin and [Wilkinson] considered
the nature of the more-restrictive confinement and its duration in
relation to prison norms and to the terms of the individual's
sentence.”); Perkins v. Kansas Dept. of Corr., 165 F.3d 803, 809
(10th Cir. 1999) (reversing a district court’s dismissal of a
plaintiff’s due process claim, despite the lack of evidence regarding
the duration of plaintiff’s detention in segregation, because the
plaintiff

alleged

sufficient

facts

that

the

conditions

of

his

confinement were extreme and unusual as compared with other inmates).
Additionally,

the

shorter

the

inmate’s

detention

in

solitary

confinement, the more relevant the conditions of confinement become.
See Iqbal v. Hasty, 490 F.3d 143, 161 (2d Cir. 2007) (“Segregation
of longer than 305 days . . . is sufficiently atypical to require
procedural due process protection . . . [but] [w]hen confinement is
of an intermediate duration . . . ‘development of a detailed record’
of the conditions of the confinement relative to ordinary prison

5

conditions is required.”)(quoting Colon v. Howard, 215 F.3d 227, 232
(2d Cir. 2000).
For example, in Wilkinson, the Court held that placement at a
supermax

facility

violated

the

plaintiffs’

due

process

rights

because the conditions of confinement were so far afield from the
inmates standard conditions that they implicated the inmates due
process rights. 545 U.S. at 224. The conditions of confinement at
issue included:
facility,

the

the indefinite duration of placement in a supermax
prohibition

on

virtually

all

human

contact,

the

complete absence of outdoor recreational time and extremely limited
indoor recreational time, and the fact that placement in supermax
disqualified an otherwise eligible inmate from parole consideration.
Id.

The court observed that “any of these conditions standing alone

might not be sufficient to create a liberty interest, taken together
they

impose

an

atypical

and

significant

hardship

within

the

correctional context.” Id. Assessing all of these factors together,
the court concluded that placement in supermax constituted a dramatic
departure from the inmates’ regular sentences and, therefore, the
inmates

“ha[d]

a

liberty

interest

in

avoiding

assignment

to

[supermax].” Id.
Although Plaintiff has not provided specific facts indicating
how long his detention in solitary confinement lasted, the Complaint
plausibly alleges that the conditions of Plaintiff’s detention were
a “dramatic departure” from ordinary prison life. Id. at 223; Sandin,

6

515 U.S. at 484. First, Plaintiff alleges that he was not permitted
to decontaminate after being placed in solitary confinement, that he
was

barred

from

seeing

a

doctor

for

his

pepper

spray-related

injuries, and that this ultimately forced him to undergo an emergency
surgery and stay for an extended period of time in the intensive
care unit at an off-site hospital. (Am. Compl. ¶¶ 20-22.)

It strains

credulity to imagine that the “ordinary incidents of prison life”
should be understood to include emergency medical procedures and
prolonged

in-patient

care

due

to

the

disciplinary

actions

of

correctional officers. Wilkinson, 545 U.S. at 223. Second, Plaintiff
alleges that, prior to his detention in solitary confinement, he was
doused with an excessive amount of pepper spray based on trumped-up
(and ultimately disproved) charges of misconduct.

Because the

Supreme Court has noted that all of the conditions of confinement
must be “taken together” when assessing whether an inmate’s due
process rights have been violated, Id. at 224, the events leading up
to Plaintiff’s placement in solitary confinement are necessarily
relevant to determine whether he had a liberty interest in avoiding
solitary confinement in the first place. Here, the allegation that
Officer Amaral took extreme and decidedly unwarranted disciplinary
action against Plaintiff prior to placing him in solitary confinement
supports Plaintiff’s contention that his due process rights were
violated. (Id.)

7

IV.

CONCLUSION
Taking the Complaint as a whole and viewing all of the facts

alleged in the light most favorable to Plaintiff, at this juncture,
the Court finds that Plaintiff has alleged sufficient facts to
support the claim that his detention in solitary confinement, as
well as the events leading up to that detention, violated his due
process rights.
570.

See Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 678; Twombly, 550 U.S. at

After discovery is complete, it may be that the facts of this

case will fall squarely under the cover of Sandin; but for now, at
the motion to dismiss stage, the facts as alleged are sufficient to
allow the count to remain.
For the reasons stated herein, the Court DENIES Defendants’
Motion to Dismiss Amended Complaint (ECF No. 19).
IT IS SO ORDERED.

William E. Smith
Chief Judge
Date: November 30, 2018

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