Whether jail command supervisors are entitled to qualified immunity for repeated supervisory failures resulting in a foreseeable, inevitable, and unconstitutional attack by a violent and abusive jailer

QUESTIONS PRESENTED Petitioner Denis Quinette was violently attacked by a jailer at the Cobb County Jail who had a terrifying history of violence and inmate abuse.! Despite this history, the jailer’s supervisors never suspended him in connection with inmate abuse and offered nothing other than de minimus discipline in response to clear and repeated violations of inmates’ constitutional rights. Petitioner sued the jailer’s supervisors under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for failing to meaningfully discipline or terminate the jailer despite this history. A divided Eleventh Circuit panel granted qualified immunity to the supervisors on the theory that, while prior precedent established the unconstitutionality of a supervisor failing to meaningfully address an employee’s repeated transgressions, those cases involved zero discipline or de minimus discipline. The panel distinguished the jailer’s history because he had received some discipline in connection with other unrelated bad conduct, despite the fact that the jailer received only de minimus discipline after he attacked and abused inmates. 1 The jailer had been the subject of twelve internal affairs investigations, six of which were deemed “founded” or “sustained” and three of which involved attacking restrained inmates. Moreover, in the previous year the jailer had pursued a sustained campaign of inmate abuse including racial slurs, physical threats, religious abuse, cruel and belittling language, and abusive behavior, as well as sexual harassment of a coworker. ii The questions presented are: 1. Whether jail command supervisors are entitled to qualified immunity where their repeated supervisory failures result in a foreseeable, inevitable, and unconstitutional attack by a violent and abusive jailer on yet another inmate? 2. How are the courts to apply qualified immunity to supervisory liability claims? Given that qualified immunity is to be applied with unique rigor “in the Fourth Amendment context, where ... [i]t is sometimes difficult for an officer to determine how the relevant legal doctrine ... will apply to the factual situation,”2 should the doctrine be applied less stringently, or should it even be applied at all, to a claim of supervisory liability? 3. Should the judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity, which is not justified by reference to the text of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 or its common law backdrop and which has been demonstrated not to serve its policy goals, be narrowed or abolished? 2 Mullenix v. Luna, 577 U.S. 7, 12, 186 S. Ct. 305, 308 (2015).