Whether the Eighth Amendment precludes qualified immunity for corrections officers who deliberately subject a prisoner to extreme cold conditions without a legitimate penological purpose

No question identified. : the Court’s Order denying rehearing en banc, are attached. The jurisdiction of this Court is based on 28 U.S.C. § 1254(1). 1. This case presents a significant question of law—namely, what circumstances must exist for the “obvious violation” doctrine to preclude application of the qualified immunity defense. In this action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violations of the Eighth Amendment, Petitioner brought claims against correctional officers for the inhumane treatment he received while in their custody as an inmate at a state prison in Wisconsin. As all members of the Seventh Circuit panel concluded, Petitioner presented sufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to conclude that the correctional officers’ actions of pepper spraying and then confining Petitioner naked in a frigid “control cell” without bedding or any protection from the cold for nearly 24 hours lacked any “legitimate penological purpose.” App., infra, A4, A20. 2. Nevertheless, in a split decision, the panel majority held that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity because the constitutional violation would not have been obvious to a reasonable corrections officer.! 3. In dissent, Judge David Hamilton reasoned that qualified immunity should not apply where, as here, a person is “deliberately refrigerate[d]” to coerce a change in his what happened to Petitioner as “torture.” As 1 Courts have begun to rely on the panel majority’s decision below in Smith to structure and refine the qualified immunity analysis in prison-conditions and excessive-force cases. See Coy v. Yarber, No. 23CV-01920, 2025 WL 2782829, at *3 (S.D. Ind. Sept. 30, 2025) (granting qualified immunity for lack of clearly established law after discussing Smith and relying on its articulation of the standards for “clearly established” law); Farner v. Conlon, No. 23 CV 1767, 2025 WL 2174451, at *10 (N.D. Ill. July 31, 2025) (granting qualified immunity after relying on Smith for what it means for a constitutional right to be “clearly established” under the law, and citing Smith for the fact that it is a “high bar”). Judge Hamilton explained, “our qualified immunity analysis should recognize actionable violations, without qualified immunity, when officials deliberately impose conditions that amount to torture.” App., infra, A28, A81. 4. The Seventh Circuit’s published, majority opinion conflicts with authoritative decisions of other United States Courts of Appeals and decisions from this Court. First, the panel decision narrows the “obvious violation” doctrine in a way that other Circuits have refused to do. See, e.g., Thorpe v. Clark, 37 F.4th 926, 93334 n.3 (4th Cir. 2022) (“[Q]ualified immunity does ‘not allow the official who actually 9 knows that he was violating the law to escape liability for his actions” because “Eighth Amendment liability comes into play only where a corrections officer appreciates the harm confinement conditions impose yet chooses to disregard it”; accordingly, showing that Defendants “knowingly promulgated harmful conditions” was sufficient); Beers-Capitol v. Whetzel, 256 F.3d 120, 142, n.15 (8d Cir. 2001) (explaining that “a defendant cannot have qualified immunity if she was deliberately indifferent” because that defendant “could not believe that her actions comported with clearly established law while also believing that there [was] an excessive risk to the plaintiffs and failing to adequately respond to that risk”). 5. Second, by requiring a factually identical case, rather than giving any force to prior decisions holding that deliberately freezing a prisoner violates the Eighth Amendment, the panel decision broke from this Court’s decision in Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730, 742 (2002), which warned against finding qualified immunity based on a “rigid, overreliance on factual similarity.” See also Taylor v. Riojas, 592 U.S. 7 (2020) (overturning finding of qualified immunity where the prisoner was kept in an unsanitary, “frigidly cold ce