Hall v. County of Milwaukee et al
Filing
44
DECISION AND ORDER signed by Judge Lynn Adelman on 5/23/18 denying 31 Motion to Certify Class. (cc: all counsel) (jad)
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
EASTERN DISTRICT OF WISCONSIN
MELISSA HALL, individually and on
behalf of all others similarly situated,
Plaintiff,
v.
Case No. 17-C-0379
COUNTY OF MILWAUKEE and
RICHARD R. SCHMIDT, in his Official
Capacity as Sheriff of Milwaukee County,1
Defendant.
______________________________________________________________________
DECISION AND ORDER
The Sheriff of Milwaukee County runs the Milwaukee County Jail and maintains a
policy under which all detainees must be shackled to their beds while they are receiving
medical treatment at a hospital. Until recently, the sheriff applied this policy to pregnant
detainees who were hospitalized for childbirth. Melissa Hall was a detainee at the
Milwaukee County Jail during the time when this policy was in force. She was shackled
to her hospital bed during labor, delivery, and post-partum treatment. She filed this
action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against Milwaukee County and its sheriff, alleging that
the sheriff’s policy, as applied to pregnant women during childbirth, violated the Due
Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Hall proposes to represent a class of all
women who were confined in the jail while the policy was in force and who were
1
When the plaintiff filed this case, the Sheriff of Milwaukee County was David A. Clarke,
Jr. The plaintiff named Clarke, in his official capacity, as a defendant. Richard R.
Schmidt has since replaced Clarke as the sheriff. I have amended the caption to reflect
that Schmidt was automatically substituted as the defendant under Federal Rule of Civil
Procedure 25(d).
shackled during childbirth. Before me now is her motion to certify the class under
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23.
I. FACTS
The plaintiff was incarcerated at the Milwaukee County Jail from February 2013
to August 2013. During this time, the official policy of the Milwaukee County Sheriff was
that “[i]nmates in the hospital will be restrained by a handcuff and leg iron attached to
the side rail of the bed.” (Pl.’s Exs. 2 & 3; ECF Nos. 31-2 & 31-3.) The policy made no
exception for pregnant inmates who were hospitalized for childbirth.
Moreover, the
sheriff’s department made no individualized assessment of an inmate before deciding to
shackle her during childbirth.
While she was in the jail, the plaintiff spent two days in the hospital for labor,
delivery, and post-partum care. At the hospital, she was restrained with leg irons, wrist
restraints, and a belly chain. At least one armed sheriff’s deputy was in the room with
her at all times. The plaintiff asked to have the restraints removed, but the deputies
refused.
A nurse asked to have the restraints removed while the plaintiff was
undergoing a stress test, but again the deputies refused. During delivery, the doctor
asked to have some of the restraints removed. The deputies agreed to remove the
belly chain, but the plaintiff remained shackled to the bed with a handcuff and a leg iron.
The shackles made it difficult to administer an epidural, left marks on the plaintiff’s
wrists, cut her ankles, and made it difficult for her to hold her newborn son.
According to the plaintiff, at least 45 inmates were shackled during childbirth
while the sheriff’s policy was in force. Seven of these women have filed declarations in
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this case. In their declarations, they describe being restrained under circumstances
similar to the plaintiff’s.
II. DISCUSSION
The plaintiff proposes to have the claims of the 45 women who were shackled
during childbirth adjudicated as a class action. When a case is certified as a class
action, a class representative litigates a common claim on behalf of a large group of
similarly situated persons. Because the claim of the class representative is largely the
same as the claims of the absent class members, using the class device enables the
court to resolve most of the issues that affect all class members by adjudicating only the
class representative’s claim.
To determine whether a class may be certified, I must conduct a two-step
analysis. Under the first step, I must determine whether the plaintiff has satisfied the
four express requirements of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(a) and a fifth, implied
requirement not mentioned in the rule but enforced by the courts. The four express
requirements are: (1) the class is so numerous that joinder of all members is
impracticable; (2) there are questions of law or fact common to the class; (3) the claim
of the named plaintiff is typical of the claims of the class members; and (4) the plaintiff
will fairly and adequately protect the interests of the class. These four requirements are
known as “numerosity,” “commonality,” “typicality,” and “adequacy of representation.”
The fifth, implied requirement is known as “ascertainability.” It requires that the class
“be defined clearly” and that its membership be determined “by objective criteria rather
than by, for example, a class member's state of mind.” Mullins v. Direct Digital, LLC,
795 F.3d 654, 657 (7th Cir. 2015).
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Under the second step of the analysis, I must determine whether the case meets
one of the three criteria identified in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b). In the
present case, Hall seeks to have the class certified under Rule 23(b)(3). This is allowed
only if (a) questions of law or fact common to the class members predominate over
questions affecting only individual members and (b) a class action is superior to other
available methods for fairly and efficiently adjudicating the controversy.
In order to analyze whether the plaintiff’s claim satisfies the above requirements,
I must first describe the nature of her claim. The plaintiff alleges that, by restraining her
during childbirth, the sheriff deprived her of her right to be free from the use of
unnecessary bodily restraints.
See May v. Sheahan, 226 F.3d 876, 884 (7th Cir.
2000).2 The use of bodily restraints is unnecessary “if their use is not rationally related
to a legitimate non-punitive government purpose or they appear excessive in relation to
the purpose they allegedly serve.” Id. To apply this standard, a court balances the
detainee’s interest in being free from unnecessary restraints against the jail’s reason for
using the restraints, i.e., preventing escapes and protecting the safety of inmates,
guards, and medical providers. See Hart v. Sheahan, 396 F.3d 887, 893 (7th Cir.
2005). If, under the circumstances, the risk of the inmate’s escaping or harming another
2
The due-process right at issue in this case applies only to “pretrial detainees,” who are
persons who have been charged with crimes but have not been convicted. See Bell v.
Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 523 (1979). The defendants contend that at least some of the
potential class members—including the plaintiff herself—were serving criminal
sentences while they were in the jail and therefore do not qualify as pretrial detainees.
However, the difference between a pretrial detainee and a convicted prisoner turns out
to be irrelevant to the outcome of this motion, and thus I will not discuss it further.
Instead, I assume without deciding that the plaintiff and the potential class members
were all pretrial detainees.
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person does not outweigh the inmate’s interest in being free from the restraints, then
applying the restraints will violate the inmate’s constitutional rights.
For the plaintiff to prevail on her claim, then, she must show that the jail did not
have sufficient reason to believe that she would attempt to escape or to harm herself or
others if she was not shackled during childbirth. But here we immediately encounter a
problem that prevents me from certifying the plaintiff’s claim as a class action: each
inmate is different, and thus, at least in theory, the sheriff could have had sufficient
reason for shackling some inmates but not others.
Some inmates may be more
dangerous or likely to attempt an escape than others. Perhaps the vast majority of
inmates will not try to escape or to harm themselves or others while they are in the
hospital for childbirth. For these women, the sheriff’s interest in preventing escapes and
harm to other persons would likely not justify the use of shackles during childbirth. But it
is at least conceivable that an inmate could be so dangerous or likely to attempt an
escape that the sheriff would be justified in restraining her during childbirth. Thus, the
claims of the potential class members are not amenable to resolution on a
representative basis. That is, resolving the plaintiff’s claim will not go very far towards
resolving the claim of any other potential class member. If the plaintiff wins her claim,
all that she will have established is that the sheriff did not have reason to believe that
she was so dangerous or likely to escape that she needed to be restrained during
childbirth. It would not follow from the resolution of her claim that the sheriff did not
have reason to believe that any other woman in the class was so dangerous or likely to
escape that she needed to be restrained during childbirth. Rather, to resolve the claims
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of the other women, the facts and circumstances applicable to each of them would have
to be examined. This would require 45 separate trials.
The plaintiff attempts to get around this problem by noting that her theory of the
case is that there could never be an adequate justification for shackling any woman
during labor, delivery, or post-partum care, no matter how dangerous she may be.
(Reply Br. at 7, ECF No. 39.) But this tactic fails for two reasons. First, in order to win
her own claim, the plaintiff does not have to prove that there could never be an
adequate justification for shackling a woman during childbirth. Instead, all the plaintiff
has to prove is that the jail did not have an adequate justification for shackling her. The
same goes for the other class members: each of them only has to prove that the sheriff
did not have sufficient reason for shackling her. None of them has to also prove that the
sheriff could never constitutionally shackle a woman during childbirth.
The second problem with the plaintiff’s tactic is that answering the plaintiff’s
proposed common question will not necessarily go a long way towards resolving the
claims of the proposed class. To be sure, if the court agreed with the plaintiff and found
that there could never be an adequate justification for shackling an inmate during
childbirth, then the plaintiff will have established that every class member was unlawfully
shackled, and this would go a long way towards resolving the claims of the entire class.
But if the court disagreed with the plaintiff and determined that the sheriff could shackle
an inmate during childbirth under some circumstances, then the answer would not
resolve any class member’s claim. Instead, the court would have to separately examine
the facts and circumstances surrounding each class member to determine whether the
sheriff violated her constitutional rights.
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The above problems show that there are no “questions of law or fact common to
the class.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(a)(2). A common question is a “common contention” that
is “of such a nature that it is capable of classwide resolution—which means that
determination of its truth or falsity will resolve an issue that is central to the validity of
each one of the claims in one stroke.” Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 564 U.S. 338,
350 (2011). As the analysis above shows, in the present case there is no question that
can be answered in a way that will resolve an issue that is central to the validity of all 45
potential class members’ claims in one stroke. Instead, the court must look at the facts
and circumstances surrounding each individual class member to determine whether the
sheriff had an adequate justification for shackling her during childbirth.
In another attempt to demonstrate that the claims of the proposed class raise
common questions, the plaintiff notes that the sheriff applied his shackling policy to
every inmate who was hospitalized for childbirth and did not individually assess an
inmate to determine whether she was dangerous enough to warrant shackling. The
plaintiff argues that, for this reason, the fact that the sheriff “theoretically could have
justified using shackles on some of the women . . . does not undercut the fact that
common issues will dominate this case.” (Reply Br. at 6.) However, no potential class
member’s rights were violated by the mere existence of the policy or by the mere fact
that the sheriff did not perform an individualized assessment before deciding to restrain
her. Rather, to the extent that any constitutional violations occurred, they occurred
when the sheriff applied shackles to inmates who were insufficiently likely to try to
escape or to harm others while they were in the hospital for childbirth. Even though the
sheriff, in effect, assumed that all inmates were likely to try to escape or to harm others
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if they were not shackled during childbirth, it does not follow that the sheriff violated the
rights of every shackled inmate. The sheriff may be able to show that at least some of
the inmates were dangerous enough to warrant shackling under the applicable
constitutional standard. For those inmates, the sheriff’s blanket policy would not have
resulted in a violation of their rights. Thus, separate trials will be needed to determine
which, if any, inmates suffered constitutional violations when the policy was applied to
them.
Of course, whether the sheriff maintained a policy under which all inmates were
shackled during childbirth is a common question of fact that applies to every class
member’s claim. But this question of fact is undisputed and will require no litigation—
the sheriff concedes that the policy existed and that it was uniformly applied to all
women during childbirth. Thus, even if this question of fact qualified as a common
question for purposes of Rule 23(a)(2), it would constitute only a very small part of this
case.
The individual issues—including whether any given class member was
unconstitutionally shackled—would predominate. As is relevant to this case, a class
may be certified only if the common questions rather than the individual issues
predominate. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(b)(3). So the question of whether the sheriff
maintained the shackling policy is not a question that can, by itself, serve as a basis for
class certification.
Although I must deny the plaintiff’s motion for class certification, I note that this
does not mean that the plaintiff and the other inmates who were shackled during
childbirth cannot litigate their claims simultaneously as part of a single legal proceeding.
Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20, persons having similar claims against a
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defendant may join in one action as plaintiffs. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 20(a)(1). Moreover,
the court may consolidate separate actions that raise similar issues. See Fed. R. Civ.
P. 42. Unlike with a class action, neither of these options would allow the plaintiff to
represent the other women.
Rather, each woman would have to be named as a
plaintiff, and each woman’s claim would have to be individually adjudicated. But it may
be more efficient to conduct joint proceedings on the separate claims. For example,
because many of the same documents and witnesses will be involved in each claim, it
may make sense to consolidate the claims for purposes of discovery. Thus, the plaintiff
and the other women who were injured by the sheriff’s policy may wish to consider
pursuing joinder under Rule 20 or consolidation under Rule 42.
III. CONCLUSION
For the reasons stated, IT IS ORDERED that the plaintiff’s motion for class
certification (ECF No. 31) is DENIED.
Dated at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this 23rd day of May, 2018.
s/Lynn Adelman____________
LYNN ADELMAN
United States District Judge
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