Thomas v. Jacobs

Background

James Thomas, who was incarcerated in the custody of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, sued Officer E. Jacobs, Sgt. Miller, Superintendent William Keyser, Nurse Lescano, and Sgt. Milisauskas. He proceeded without a lawyer. His claims arose from searches at Sullivan Correctional Facility on February 18 and April 16, 2019, and from events afterward.

On February 18, officials suspected that Thomas had hidden contraband in his body after a visit. Miller and Jacobs took him to a strip-frisk room. During the encounter, Thomas resisted commands, a struggle followed, pepper spray was used by a non-party officer, and Thomas was taken to the floor and handcuffed. A balloon containing prohibited substances was recovered. Thomas testified that Jacobs put his fingers inside Thomas’s rectum to remove the contraband; Jacobs and Miller denied that this happened. The video did not clearly resolve what Jacobs did during several seconds when his actions were partly blocked from view.

Thomas was later taken for medical treatment. He alleged that Lescano failed to respond adequately after he reported swallowing contraband or suffering pain and bleeding. Lescano’s records and the hospital records did not document the alleged rectal injury. Thomas was eventually sent to an outside hospital, where additional contraband was recovered.

On April 16, Milisauskas ordered another search after receiving information about drugs and seeing Thomas flush what appeared to be tobacco. Thomas denied possessing drugs and claimed that officers planted marijuana and retaliated against him for complaining about the February search. He also alleged that Jacobs threatened or assaulted him, that unnamed officers reduced his food portions, and that Keyser failed to protect him from retaliation.

Summary-judgment standard and evidence

Summary judgment is granted when the evidence shows no genuine dispute about a fact that could affect the outcome and the moving party is entitled to judgment under the law. The court may treat properly supported facts as undisputed when the opposing party does not properly respond, but it must still examine whether the moving party met its burden. Although Thomas did not submit a required factual response, affidavits, or supporting records, the court considered his deposition testimony and gave his filings the broader reading required for a person proceeding without a lawyer.

Fourth Amendment claim against Jacobs

The court assumed that Thomas had at least some reasonable expectation that officers would not manually remove contraband from his body in the sudden and forceful way he described. It analyzed the search under the test for an isolated prison search, considering the intrusion’s scope, the manner of the search, the justification for it, and the place where it occurred.

The court concluded that the search was strongly justified because officials had substantial reasons to believe Thomas was concealing contraband. The private setting and the presence of only a limited number of officers also favored the defendants. The scope and manner of the search weighed against finding it reasonable because a jury could possibly credit Thomas’s account that some force or contact was used to dislodge the contraband, and medical personnel rather than correction officers were supposed to perform a manual search under the prison’s procedures.

The court described the constitutional question as close but did not finally decide whether the search was unreasonable. Instead, it held that Jacobs was entitled to qualified immunity, a legal protection that generally shields an official unless the official violated a clearly established right that a reasonable officer would have understood. The court found no precedent that clearly prohibited an officer in Jacobs’s position from using force to recover an object believed to be protruding from an inmate’s anus. The court therefore granted summary judgment on the Fourth Amendment claim.

Eighth Amendment claims concerning the search

The court rejected Thomas’s excessive-force claim against Jacobs. Even accepting Thomas’s account, the court found that the documented injuries—pepper spray in his eyes and scrapes on his shoulder and knee—were minor, and the record contained no evidence of an injury to his anus. The court concluded that the force was not sufficiently harmful to violate the Eighth Amendment and that the evidence did not show Jacobs acted to maliciously or sadistically cause harm rather than to recover suspected contraband. The court granted the defendants’ motion on this claim.

The court also rejected Thomas’s claim that the search was sexual abuse. It found no evidence that the search was intended to humiliate him or to produce sexual arousal or gratification. The search was justified by the suspected contraband and was limited to the area where officials reasonably expected to find it. The court granted the motion on this claim as well. Any failure-to-intervene or supervisory claims connected to this search against Miller or Lescano were also dismissed because there was no underlying constitutional violation and no reasonable opportunity to intervene.

Claims against Lescano

The court treated Thomas’s allegations against Lescano as an Eighth Amendment medical-indifference claim. Such a claim requires proof that the prisoner had a sufficiently serious medical need and that the official knew of and disregarded a substantial risk of serious harm.

The court found that the evidence did not support either part of the claim. The record did not show that Thomas told Lescano about rectal pain or bleeding, and even his unsworn account would not have described a sufficiently serious injury. As to Thomas’s testimony that he may have swallowed a balloon containing contraband, the court found no evidence that the short delay before he was sent to the hospital worsened his condition or caused additional complications. The records showed that Lescano informed the prison doctor, returned Thomas to one-on-one monitoring, and checked on him later. The court concluded that any disagreement about the proper treatment or any negligence was not a constitutional violation.

The court also rejected Thomas’s Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection claim against Lescano because he offered no evidence that she treated him differently from similarly situated inmates or that any different treatment was based on an impermissible consideration or bad faith. The motion for summary judgment on the claims against Lescano was granted.

Retaliation claims

The court recognized that filing complaints against correction officers is protected activity. It assumed that the alleged April strip search and alleged planting of drugs could qualify as adverse actions, and it noted factual disputes about whether the search was pretextual and whether drugs were planted. But the court found insufficient evidence connecting those events to Thomas’s complaints about Jacobs. In particular, the record did not show that Milisauskas knew about those complaints, and the roughly two-month gap, without additional evidence of retaliatory intent, was insufficient. The court granted the motion as to the retaliation claim against Milisauskas.

The court also granted the motion as to the retaliation claim against Jacobs. Verbal harassment alone was not enough, and Thomas’s unverified amended-complaint allegations about Jacobs visiting and choking him at the hospital could not be used as evidence on summary judgment. The admissible record did not show that the alleged hospital incident occurred.

As to the unnamed officers, Thomas offered insufficient facts from which a jury could infer a connection between reduced food portions and his protected complaints. The court also stated that, because discovery had ended, claims against unnamed officers who could not be identified had to be dismissed. The court granted the motion on the supervisory claim against Keyser because the record did not show that he personally knew of and disregarded a specific risk to Thomas. Instead, the evidence indicated that Keyser allowed an investigation to proceed.

Disposition

The court granted Defendants’ motion for summary judgment, directed the Clerk to enter judgment for Defendants, and closed the case. It also rejected Thomas’s complaints that Defendants had failed to provide discovery, adhering to its earlier finding that Defendants had fulfilled their discovery obligations.