Victor Parsons v. Charles Ryan

784 F.3d 571, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 6556, 2015 WL 1798880
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
DecidedApril 21, 2015
Docket13-16396
StatusPublished
Cited by3 cases

This text of 784 F.3d 571 (Victor Parsons v. Charles Ryan) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Victor Parsons v. Charles Ryan, 784 F.3d 571, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 6556, 2015 WL 1798880 (9th Cir. 2015).

Opinion

ORDER

The panel voted to deny the petition for rehearing en banc; the petition was subsequently withdrawn. The full court was so notified.

A judge then requested a vote on whether to rehear the matter en banc. The matter failed to receive a majority of the votes of the nonrecused active judges in favor of en banc reconsideration. Fed. R. App. P. 35.

Judge Ikuta’s dissent from denial of rehearing en banc is filed concurrently with this Order.

The mandate shall issue forthwith.

IKUTA, Circuit Judge,

with whom KOZINSKI, O’SCANNLAIN, CALLAHAN, BEA, and M. SMITH, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

The Supreme Court has established two straightforward principles that are applicable to this appeal. First, before certifying a class, a court must ensure that all members of the potential class have the same sort of claim, and that the claim is susceptible to classwide resolution. See Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, — U.S. —, 131 S.Ct. 2541, 2551, 180 L.Ed.2d 374 (2011). Second, a prisoner does not have an Eighth Amendment claim merely because the prisoner is incarcerated in a prison with a defective medical system. See Lewis v. Casey, 518 U.S. 343, 349-51, 116 S.Ct. 2174, 135 L.Ed.2d 606 (1996); cf. Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 104, 97 S.Ct. 285, 50 L.Ed.2d 251 (1976). Today, the court turns its back on both of these principles by leaving in place the opinion of a three-judge panel that affirms the certification of a class consisting of every one of the 33,000 prisoners incarcerated in the Arizona prison system on the theory that each of those prisoners has a common claim for an Eighth Amendment violation. I dissent from our failure to take this opinion en banc in order to vacate it. 1

*573 The preliminary record in this case reveals serious systemwide problems with healthcare in the Arizona prison system. But the record does not establish that every one of the 33,000 prisoners in the Arizona prisons has a serious medical need, see Estelle, 429 U.S. at 104-06, 97 S.Ct. 285, and faces a similar substantial risk of serious harm due to defendants’ alleged deliberate indifference to this need, see Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 847, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994). Rather, the evidence in the record shows a diverse group of prisoners with different health conditions and needs who require different levels of medical care. While all prisoners in some sense are exposed to the same systemic inadequacies of the Arizona prisons’ medical facilities, that exposure alone does not give rise to an Eighth Amendment claim. See Estelle, 429 U.S. at 103, 97 S.Ct. 285; see also Lewis, 518 U.S. at 349-51, 116 S.Ct. 2174.

Despite the lack of any support in the record, the panel nevertheless affirms the certification of this diverse class of prisoners — even though not all members of the class have an Eighth Amendment claim, let alone a common claim — in defiance of Dukes, Lewis, and the Supreme Court’s. Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. See Dukes, 131 S.Ct. at 2551; Lewis, 518 U.S. at 349-51, 116 S.Ct. 2174; Wilson v. Seiter, 501 U.S. 294, 297-300, 111 S.Ct. 2321, 115 L.Ed.2d 271 (1991); Estelle, 429 U.S. at 104-06, 97 S.Ct. 285; Farmer, 511 U.S. at 832-34, 114 S.Ct. 1970. The panel also 'creates a circuit split with the Third Circuit. See Rouse v. Plantier, 182 F.3d 192 (3d Cir.1999) (Alito, J.). By refusing to vacate this opinion and thereby designating it as the law of our circuit, the'court endorses a view of the Eighth Amendment and class actions that is at odds with the binding authority of the Supreme Court.

I

Thirteen inmates in custody throughout the Arizona prison system brought a class action suit (under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) against senior officials in the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) in March 2012. Parsons v. Ryan (Parsons II), 754 F.3d 657, 662-63 (9th Cir.2014). They alleged that through its various systemwide practices and policies regarding prisoners’ medical, dental, and mental health care, the ADC is “deliberately indifferent” to the resulting “significant injury and substantial risk of serious harm” to all prisoners in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Dist. Ct. Dkt. 1 (Complaint) ¶ 26. The prisoners identified ten such practices, “including inadequate staffing, outright denials of care, lack of emergency treatment, failure to stock and provide critical medication, grossly substandard dental care, and failure to provide therapy and psychiatric medication to mentally ill inmates,” Parsons II, 754 F.3d at 663, and provided several examples that *574 illustrated how the practices inflicted harm on individual prisoners, see id. at 664-67 & nn. 5-9. As one would expect in a class so large, the different injuries alleged varied widely depending on the specific medical needs of each prisoner. For instance, prisoners with chronic health problems alleged they were given incorrect or expired medications; prisoners with acute medical needs alleged they did not receive timely emergency services; prisoners with dental needs alleged they were denied necessary permanent fillings or other dental treatment; and prisoners with mental health needs alleged they did not receive the monitoring and treatment they required due to inadequate staffing. Id.

Plaintiffs moved to certify- a class consisting of all approximately 33,000- prisoners in the ten ADC prisons. Id. at 662-63; Dist. Ct. Dkt. 1 ¶¶ 101-02. They supplemented their allegations in the complaint with a number of documents obtained from the ADC in discovery. These documents included internal reviews and exchanges between ADC officials and independent contractors that revealed serious dysfunction in the ADC healthcare system. See Parsons II, 754 F.3d at 668-69. In addition, plaintiffs submitted four expert reports that criticized the ADC’s healthcare system. Id. at 669-72. The experts offered their opinion that the practices and policies placed four specific groups of prisoners at substantial risk of serious harm: (1) prisoners who require medical care, (2) prisoners who need dental care, (3) prisoners who require mental health care, and (4) prisoners in solitary confinement.

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