Court Allows Inmate’s Suit to Proceed

In an unusually blunt opinion, a federal appeals court panel in San Francisco on Monday unanimously rebuffed the efforts of the California attorney general’s office to dismiss an inmate’s claim that he was a victim of brutality by a guard.

Christopher Watts, an inmate at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, filed a lawsuit alleging that, during a 1995 interrogation, a prison guard slammed him into a wall and kicked him in the genitals while he was lying on the floor handcuffed with his hands behind his back.

U.S. District Judge Susan Y. Illston ruled earlier that Watts was entitled to a trial on the issue of whether the guard had applied force “maliciously and sadistically to cause harm” in violation of the Constitution’s 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The guard, represented by the state attorney general’s office, appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in an attempt to have Watts’ case thrown out.

Attorneys for the state argued that, even if Watts’ assertion were true, it would not represent a violation of the 8th Amendment.

They also argued that “a reasonable officer ... would not necessarily have believed” his conduct was unlawful.

Judge John Noonan, writing for the court, noted that the guard’s response to the allegation was to describe it as a kick “in the groin.”

Noonan, an appointee of President Reagan, flatly rejected the state’s legal argument and raised pointed questions about the state’s approach. “A lawyer must be zealous on behalf of his client,” Noonan wrote. “But zeal needs to be tempered by common sense.

“To suppose that any reasonable person, let alone a trained prison officer, would not know that kicking a helpless prisoner’s genitals was cruel and unusual conduct is beyond belief,” Noonan wrote. Judges Betty B. Fletcher, an appointee of President Carter, and Sidney R. Thomas, an appointee of President Clinton, joined in the ruling.

Noonan cited a 1992 decision by the Supreme Court in which the justices held, by a 7-to-2 vote, that prison guards violate the Constitution when they needlessly pummel, kick or torture inmates, even if the blows do not cause permanent injury. Under the 8th Amendment, guards may not “maliciously and sadistically use force to cause harm,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the court.

The high court, Noonan wrote, “did not need to create a catalogue of all the acts by which cruel and sadistic purpose to harm another would be manifest.” However, he said, “if it had, such an act would be near the top of the list. The case must go to trial.”

A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said the deputy who filed the brief, Gregory S. Walton, no longer works for the department. The spokesman declined to elaborate.