Two Orange County detention officers cannot avoid liability in a federal lawsuit alleging that their neglect led to a man’s death in 2020, a federal appellate court ruled last week.
On July 2, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit concluded that there was sufficient evidence that the officers waited 22 minutes to check on inmate Maurice King, even though they suspected he had been assaulted and had heard him groaning, because they wanted to avoid extra paperwork.
As a result, the court said, the officers cannot claim qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that exempts law-enforcement officers from liability in lawsuits. Except in rare instances, like this case, qualified immunity makes it difficult for plaintiffs to win lawsuits against law-enforcement officers. This ruling will likely set precedent for how similar cases will be handled in the future.
As The Assembly previously reported, King was awaiting sentencing on drug charges when he died on March 4, 2020, hours after another inmate assaulted him in his cell. His mother, Tiffany King, filed a federal lawsuit the following year alleging that officers William Berry Jr. and Thomas Linster III waited an hour and a half before checking on King and seeking medical attention. King wasn’t taken to Duke University Hospital for more than two hours, and died minutes after arriving. An autopsy report listed King’s cause of death as hypertensive cardiovascular disease following a physical altercation.
The lawsuit also alleged that Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood operated a jail where officers routinely bucked local policies and state standards. From 2017 to 2020, state inspectors repeatedly cited the sheriff’s office for lax supervision and for allowing inmates to use towels and other items to obscure views into their cells.
U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagle ruled that qualified immunity did not protect the officers from civil liability, but Linster and Berry appealed that decision. She also concluded that the officers made false statements about what happened. The appeal delayed their trial, which was scheduled for March 2025.
Judge Julius Richardson, who was nominated by President Donald Trump and assumed office in August 2018, wrote in the panel’s unanimous decision upholding Eagle’s ruling last week: “We agree that a reasonable jury could find the officers consciously disregarded a substantial risk of serious harm. And we agree that such disregard would violate clearly established law.”
Allyn Sharp, Tiffany King’s attorney, declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Brian Castro, lead attorney for the defendants, also declined to comment.
At the time of the assault, King was housed in B-Pod, a maximum security section of the Orange County jail. According to court documents, an inmate named Tyler Grantz entered King’s cell sometime after 6:39 p.m. on March 4, 2020, and assaulted him. Three other inmates went in and out of King’s cell.
Linster first heard signs of trouble at 7:47 p.m., according to the summary in Richardson’s opinion. Linster also heard a “concerning noise” coming from King’s cell but ignored it. Three minutes later, Berry and Linster turned on the intercom in King’s cell. Berry told investigators he thought he heard a “moan or a groan” and “someone talking.”
Twenty-two minutes passed without either officer checking on King. Because the officers have to punch a sensor on a schedule after finishing their rounds, Berry explained the delay to investigators by saying that he didn’t want to punch too early.
“[I]f you go in 1 minute early, you have to fill out that damn paper… at 5 o’clock in the morning before you go home that you missed a punch,” Berry said in a deposition, according to the ruling.
Both officers told investigators they suspected King had been assaulted, with Berry adding that he looked for injuries when he entered the cell “because somebody [could have] hit him in the face.” Linster told Berry he wanted to determine whether King had been assaulted because “I don’t want to accuse nobody of something they ain’t done.” (Grantz was charged with involuntary manslaughter and later pleaded no contest to that charge; he was sentenced to a maximum of two years and eight months in prison.)
Along with the officers’ disclosures, Richardson noted Berry’s conflicting timeline around when he retrieved an inhaler for King, who had a history of asthma. Berry initially said he had gotten the inhaler before he entered King’s cell. But later Berry said he retrieved it after entering the cell because King asked him to. (Surveillance footage supported Berry’s first version of events, but not the second.)
The officers have argued that they made a good-faith, though slow, effort to help King and did not immediately realize the extent of his injuries. But Richardson dismissed that argument based on their conflicting accounts.
The Fourth Circuit’s ruling sends the case back to the U.S. District Court for trial, but the defendants could appeal the decision.
You must be logged in to post a comment.