Whether Kingsley v. Hendrickson's objective-reasonableness standard applies to pretrial detainees' deliberate-indifference claims

QUESTION PRESENTED In Kingsley v. Hendrickson, 576 U.S. 389 (2015), this Court held that “pretrial detainees (unlike convicted prisoners) cannot be punished at all, much less ‘maliciously and sadistically,” and therefore that a pretrial detainee’s excessive-force claim arises under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, not under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Id. at 400 (citation omitted). As a result, this Court held that a pretrial detainee bringing an excessive-force claim is not required to prove that the defendants were subjectively aware that the amount of force used was unreasonable, but instead only that the defendants’ conduct was objectively unreasonable. Since Kingsley, the courts of appeals have been divided about whether its holding applies only to excessive-force claims, or whether it also governs claims that defendants were deliberately indifferent to dangers to pretrial detainees while imprisoned (failure-to-protect claims), to their serious medical needs, or to their conditions of confinement. The question presented, accordingly, is whether, in light of Kingsley, pretrial detainees claiming that defendants were deliberately indifferent to the dangers that their confinement presented must show that defendants were subjectively aware of those dangers and failed to respond reasonably, or only that defend ants’ conduct was objectively unreasonable. (i)