Deliberate Indifference – 8th Amendment

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Jessie Rivera v. Ravi Gupta et al

Case No.: 15-3462

Officials: POSNER, EASTERBROOK, and SYKES, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Deliberate Indifference – 8^th Amendment

Physician threatened to discipline inmate if he continued complaining about pain

“We are mindful of the Supreme Courtʹs ruling in Helling v. McKinney, 509 U.S. 25, 35 (1993), that a prisoner who claims that the defendants have failed to handle his health issues properly must establish “both the subjective and the objective elements necessary to prove an Eighth Amendment violation.” The objective component is the seriousness of the inmate’s medical condition, and as Rivera’s burn injury was objectively serious, that element of the test is satisfied. The subjective component is the “deliberate indifference” component and one way to satisfy it is by showing that the prison doctor provided no treatment even though the circumstances indicated that treatment clearly was warranted, thus permitting an inference that in failing to provide any treatment the doctor had acted with a culpable state of mind (de‐ liberate indifference, equivalent to recklessness in criminal law). So there is evidence of both Helling components of Rivera’s claim and therefore his case against Gupta should go to a jury. The defendants suggest that Rivera must have been exaggerating his symptoms because he never complained to the medical staff about the pain and numbness in his leg after his appointment with Gupta in 2012. That would not be surprising were it true, given the brush‐off that Gupta had given him and the threat to discipline him if he continued complaining about numbness and pain and difficulty walking. Rivera may indeed have given up on the medical staff of the prison (FCI‐Oxford), but two years after his brush‐up with Gupta, and after being transferred to another prison (MCC‐Chicago)—where he no longer had to worry about Gupta—Rivera told a clinician at his new prison that he still had pain and numbness at the burn site.

Reversed and remanded in part, affirmed in part

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