Refer an inmate to mental health staff for assessment if the inmate gives a “Yes” response to ANY question. There are no exceptions to this procedure. If the inmate gives an affirmative response to question 9,[4] make an immediate referral to mental health staff and make sure continuous “eyes on” supervision is provided until seen by the mental health staff.
[Our cases] stand only for the proposition that when the State takes a person into its custody and holds him there against his will, the Constitution imposes upon it a corresponding duty to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being.... The affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State's knowledge of the individual's predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf.
If a prisoner is under the care of medical experts ..., a non-medical prison official will generally be justified in believing that the prisoner is in capable hands. This follows naturally from the division of labor within a prison. Inmate health and safety is promoted by dividing responsibility for various aspects of inmate life among guards, administrators, physicians, and so on. Holding a non-medical prison official liable in a case where a prisoner was under a physician's care would strain this division of labor. Moreover, under such a regime, nonmedical officials could even have a perverse incentive not to delegate treatment responsibility to the very physicians most likely to be able to help prisoners, for fear of vicarious liability.
Assuming, as Plaintiffs appear to argue, that deliberate indifference ... can be shown by Defendants' deliberate indifference to the medical needs of prisoners such as Barkes himself ... the Court nonetheless concludes that nothing alters the prior conclusions: a reasonable factfinder could not determine that Defendants were deliberately indifferent to the risk of suicide.
this absence of prior incidents and knowledge thereof is not necessarily fatal to Sample 's case. As we have noted, [Canton ] observed that there are situations in which the risk of constitutionally cognizable harm is so great and so obvious that the risk and the failure of supervisory officials to respond will alone support findings of the existence of an unreasonable risk, of knowledge of that unreasonable risk, and of indifference to it.
Based on City of Canton, we conclude that a judgment could not properly be entered against [the supervisor] in this case based on supervisory liability absent an identification by [the plaintiff] of a specific supervisory practice or procedure that [the supervisor] failed to employ and specific findings by the district court that (1) the existing custom and practice without that specific practice or procedure created an unreasonable risk of prison overstays, (2) [the supervisor] was aware that this unreasonable risk existed, (3) [the supervisor] was indifferent to that risk, and (4) [the subordinate's constitutional tort] resulted from [the supervisor's] failure to employ that supervisory practice or procedure.
Appellees claim that Taylor and Williams should have enforced FCM's compliance with their contractual obligations, specifically by requiring FCM to adhere to up-to-date NCCHC standards, by properly administering the standards to which they adhered, and by requiring mental health screenings to have been conducted by a qualified mental health professional rather than an unqualified LPN, thus satisfying Sample's threshold requirement.
[I]t is not enough for a plaintiff to argue that the constitutionally cognizable injury would not have occurred if the superior had done more than he or she did. The district court must insist that [the plaintiff] identify specifically what it is that [the supervisor] failed to do that evidences his deliberate indifference. Only in the context of a specific defalcation on the part of the supervisory official can the court assess whether the official's conduct evidenced deliberate indifference and whether there is a close causal relationship between the “identified deficiency” and the “ultimate injury.”
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