Mathis v. Fairman

120 F.3d 88, 1997 WL 416535
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
DecidedJuly 24, 1997
DocketNo. 96-1160
StatusPublished
Cited by39 cases

This text of 120 F.3d 88 (Mathis v. Fairman) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Mathis v. Fairman, 120 F.3d 88, 1997 WL 416535 (7th Cir. 1997).

Opinion

ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge.

Jerome Mathis committed suicide while incarcerated at the Cook County Jail, awaiting trial on a murder charge. His mother, Dorothy Mathis, filed suit against Gerome Jenkins, one of the cadets (guards in training) at the jail, as well as J.W. Fairman, the Executive Director of the Cook County Department of Corrections. She contended that Jenkins’ indifference to her son’s condition, as well as the jail’s failure to adequately staff the jail and to train its employees, proximately caused her son’s death, in violation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court entered summary judgment in favor of the defendants, concluding that the record did not reveal a triable question of fact as to whether the defendants were deliberately indifferent to Mathis’ condition. We affirm the grant of summary judgment.

The pertinent facts are as follows. On June 9,1991, Jenkins reported for work a bit after 8:00 a.m. for duty on Tier 1-D, Division 5 of the jail, a non-aggressive, protective custody tier where Mathis was housed. This was Jenkins’ first day on the job: he had been hired less than a week earlier and had just completed a four or five-day orientation. He was responsible for supervising approximately twenty-five inmates. While making a visual check of the tier, Jenkins noticed Mathis mumbling to himself in the day room. When Jenkins approached Mathis, Mathis told him that an unnamed individual was going to kill him. Jenkins testified that he reported this to his supervisor, Lieutenant Henry Troka, although Troka did not recall the conversation. Troka’s subsequent report did reflect that he spoke to Mathis himself that day, however. Troka did not believe that Mathis was in any serious risk of danger from anyone else, but decided to have Mathis transferred to a single cell just to be sure. He also concluded that Mathis ought to be given a psychological examination. Paramedic Scott Birmingham subsequently reached the same conclusion. He visited the tier at around 9:30 that morning and later spoke to Mathis for about ten minutes at the request of the prison staff. Mathis told Birmingham “that he was hearing voices of somebody wanting to kill him or he wanted to kill himself.” Birmingham prepared a written request for a psychiatric consultation (over Mathis’ objection) and sent Mathis in the company of a guard to Cermak Health Services, which provided health care to the inmate population. The record indicates that this occurred at some time between 10:00 [90]*90and 11:00 a.m.1 Mental Health Specialist Constance Williams conducted an evaluation, and concluded that Mathis was stable and needed no psychological or psychiatric treatment. Mathis denied any suicidal impulses, revealed no history of psychological problems, and expressed the desire to be returned to his cell. He was, in fact returned to the tier, where he evidently remained concerned that someone was attempting to kill him. He telephoned his family expressing that worry, and in deference to Mathis’ concern, the tier’s logbook indicated that a close eye was to be kept upon him. According to Jenkins, Mathis was checked on every thirty minutes until the end of Jenkins’ shift at 4:00 p.m. Jenkins indicated that at 3:55 p.m., he did a final visual check on Mathis, who repeated that someone was out to get him. Shortly before four o’clock, Jenkins was relieved by Melvertis Little. When Little conducted a visual inspection of the tier a short time later, she discovered Mathis hanging from a torn bed sheet that he had wrapped around an air vent in his cell. Officers cut him down within moments, and medical personnel arrived shortly thereafter. CPR was administered, but to no avail. At 4:52 p.m., Mathis was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

The district court concluded in a thorough analysis that the evidence did not support a due process claim against either Jenkins or Fairman. With respect to Jenkins, the court found that the facts at most suggested that Mathis had been acting strangely, which was not by itself sufficient notice that Mathis might harm himself. See Mem. and Order at 7, 1995 WL 769139, citing State Bank of St. Charles v. Camic, 712 F.2d 1140, 1146 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 995, 104 S.Ct. 491, 78 L.Ed.2d 686 (1983). The court noted that Mathis had no known history of mental illness or attempted suicide, and when sent for a psychological evaluation on the day of his death was determined not to present a risk to himself. Mem. and Order at 7-8. At the same time, Jenkins had exhibited no deliberate indifference to Mathis:1 he had reported Mathis’ strange behavior to his superior earlier in the day, and had checked upon him regularly thereafter until moments before Mathis killed himself. Id. at 8-9. In that regard, the court rejected the plaintiffs suggestion that the logbooks and other documentation reflecting the defendants’ efforts had been doctored to cover up their own failure to monitor Mathis. Id. at 10-13. In particular, the court did not think it significant that paramedic Birmingham, who was summoned immediately after Mathis was found dead, described the body as “cold” at 4:02 p.m. The plaintiff argued that if the body was already cold at that hour, Mathis must have already been dead for quite some time, which would in turn suggest that Jenkins had not, in fact, been checking on Mathis regularly that afternoon and had certainly not looked in on him at 3:55 p.m. But the reports of the Cook County Medical Examiner and a police detective who had investigated Mathis’ death both indicated that Mathis’ body was still warm much later, after Mathis had been taken to the hospital. The district court attributed the apparent conflict to the likelihood that medical personnel employ different means of determining when a body becomes cold, especially when that assessment is based merely on touch, which it apparently had been here. Consequently, the court did not believe that a material question of fact was presented as to just how long Mathis had been dead before his body was discovered. Finally, the court found insufficient evidence to support a finding that the jail had been inadequately staffed and that its guards had been inadequately trained. The court had before it evidence that suicides at the jail had dropped dramatically since 1980, even as the jail population had nearly tripled. Staffing complied with the mandates of state law, and although [91]*91guards occasionally worked alone, as Jenkins did, the record indicated that on the date of Mathis’ death, several other officers were present on the tier and that officers from other tiers were able to respond to trouble within moments, as they did when Mathis was discovered hanging in his cell. Finally, although cadets like Jenkins may not have been trained in suicide prevention, the jail maintained a psychiatric unit for that purpose. Id. at 13-17.

The focus of Ms. Mathis’ appeal is on the district court’s conclusion that Mathis did not kill himself until sometime between 3:55 p.m., when Jenkins said he last checked on him, and around or shortly after 4:00 p.m., when the jail staff claimed they found him dead. Ms. Mathis makes two arguments in this regard. First, she contends that it was inappropriate for the district court on summary judgment to assume that Mathis’ body was not already cold by the time his suicide was discovered, given the facial conflict between Birmingham’s report and the reports of the medical examiner and the detective.

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Bluebook (online)
120 F.3d 88, 1997 WL 416535, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/mathis-v-fairman-ca7-1997.