Harris v. Clay County, MS

Case: 21-60456 Document: 00516445794 Page: 1 Date Filed: 08/24/2022

United States Court of Appeals

for the Fifth Circuit United States Court of Appeals

Fifth Circuit

FILED

August 24, 2022

No. 21-60456 Lyle W. Cayce

Clerk

Rachel Harris, Guardian of Steven Jessie Harris, on behalf of Steven

Jessie Harris,

Plaintiff—Appellee,

versus

Clay County, Mississippi; Laddie Huffman, Former Sheriff, in

his Individual and Official Capacities; Eddie Scott, Sheriff, in his

Individual and Official Capacities,

Defendants—Appellants.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Northern District of Mississippi

USDC No. 1:18-CV-167

Before Smith, Costa, and Wilson, Circuit Judges.

Gregg Costa, Circuit Judge:

Treating the petition for rehearing en banc as a petition for panel

rehearing, the petition for panel rehearing is GRANTED. Because no

member of the panel or judge in regular active service requested that the

court be polled on rehearing en banc, the petition for rehearing en banc is

DENIED. Our prior opinion, Harris v. Clay Cnty., 40 F.4th 266, is

WITHDRAWN and the following opinion is SUBSTITUTED therefor:

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When a defendant is found incompetent to stand trial with no

reasonable expectation of restored competency, the state must either civilly

commit the defendant or release him. Jackson v. Indiana, 406 U.S. 715, 738

(1972). That simple commit-or-release rule was not followed in this case.

Steven Harris was found incompetent to stand trial, and his civil commitment

proceeding was dismissed. Yet Harris stayed in jail for six more years. This

suit challenges his years-long detention when there was no basis to hold him.

We consider whether his jailers are entitled to qualified immunity.

I

A

This case stems from a horrific crime spree in 2005. 1 Harris was

charged with murdering his father, shooting three law enforcement officers,

shooting into occupied vehicles, carjacking, and kidnapping. He pleaded not

guilty in a Clay County circuit court,2 and the court ordered that he be held

in custody without bail.

While Harris was in custody, his counsel requested a mental

evaluation to determine Harris’s competency to face trial. Harris had a long

history of suffering from schizophrenia. The circuit court agreed to the

evaluation and transferred him to a hospital. There, doctors concluded that

1

Given the summary judgment posture, we recount the facts in the light most

favorable to Harris. See Tolan v. Cotton, 572 U.S. 650, 657 (2014) (emphasizing that this

basic summary judgment principle applies in qualified immunity cases).

2

Mississippi circuit courts hear felony criminal proceedings and civil lawsuits.

About the Courts, STATE OF MISSISSIPPI JUDICIARY, https://courts.ms.gov/

aboutcourts/aboutthecourts.php (last visited June 26, 2022). Chancery courts have

jurisdiction over matters of equity, including, as relevant here, civil commitment

proceedings. Id.

2

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there was “no substantial probability that Mr. Harris [could] be restored to

competence to proceed legally in the foreseeable future.”

Harris returned to jail and awaited competency proceedings. The

court held a hearing on October 12, 2010 and agreed with the doctors that

Harris was not competent. It therefore ordered Mississippi to pursue civil

commitment proceedings in the chancery court. Importantly, the court also

ruled on Harris’s detention status: He should be held “until the

determination of said civil proceedings.”

But the civil commitment case did not last long. On the same day the

circuit court removed Harris’s criminal case from its active docket (October

20, 2010), the chancery court dismissed the just-filed commitment

proceeding for lack of jurisdiction. It based that dismissal on the pending

criminal charges—yes, the charges that had just become inactive—in the

circuit court. The circuit court apparently never caught wind of the chancery

court’s dismissal, sending Harris into legal limbo.

No one disputes that Harris remained in Clay County jail from that

point forward. It is hard to explain, then, what happened next. On October

25, 2010, Sheriff Laddie Huffman and Deputy Eddie Scott, the ones in charge

of the jail, signed a “Diligence Declaration.” The declaration purportedly

related to a separate indictment against Harris for assaulting a jailer while in

custody. 3 In that declaration, they said the following: “After diligent search

and inquiry, [we] have been unable to find the within named Steven J. Harris

in [our] county.” It appears that they submitted the declaration to the circuit

3

That indictment was filed under seal. The seal was never lifted because Harris

was never served with the indictment.

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court—further misleading the circuit court that the civil commitment

proceedings went according to plan.

Fast forward to 2012. The district attorney prosecuting Harris’s case,

Forrest Allgood, found out about the state court snafu. After putting the

pieces together, he went to Sheriff Huffman to inquire about Harris’s

confinement. This time Huffman acknowledged that Harris was still in jail

but indicated that his mental health seemed to be improving. So Allgood

submitted a Motion for Reevaluation to the circuit court, asking the court to

again determine whether Harris was competent to stand trial. The circuit

court never ruled on that motion, perhaps because the case was on its inactive

docket, and Allgood never followed up. Harris stayed in jail.

Four more years passed with no change. That is, until a Mississippi

news outlet started asking questions about the case. 4 At that point, Scott,

who had been elected Sheriff, reached out to the newly elected district

attorney to “try[] to push and get things moving” in Harris’s case. And

then—the day before the newspaper published its article—the district

attorney filed a motion for the chancery court to reconsider its dismissal of

Harris’s civil commitment case.

Things moved fast after the reconsideration motion. After holding

that its earlier dismissal was inadvertent, the chancery court finally took up

the civil case in June 2016. The court determined that Harris was a danger

to himself and others, so it committed him to a medical facility. While there,

Harris’s mental capacity was reevaluated one last time. The result was the

same—he was not competent to stand trial and had no hope of regaining

4

See Jerry Mitchell, Man in Mississippi Jail 11 Years Without Trial, Clarion

Ledger (May 21, 2016), https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2016/05/21/man-

still-in-mississippi-jail-11-years-later/84253880/.

4

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competence. The circuit court dismissed his criminal charges in 2017.

Harris was released to his family soon after. He continues to receive medical

care for his mental disorders.

B

Harris’s mother, on his behalf, sued District Attorney Allgood,

Sheriffs Huffman and Scott, and Clay County under Section 1983. 5 The suit

alleges that the defendants violated Harris’s Fourteenth Amendment due

process rights by unlawfully detaining him for years. The complaint also

contends that, at one point, Huffman held Harris down and forced him to

take unwanted medication. As to Clay County, Harris argued that Sheriffs

Huffman and Scott were final policymakers, making the county liable under

Monell. The defendants sought summary judgment; Harris responded with

a motion for partial summary judgment.

The district court first dismissed Allgood from the case, concluding

he had absolute prosecutorial immunity and qualified immunity. It came out

the other way as to Huffman and Scott. It determined that they were not

entitled to qualified immunity on the detention claim because—taking

Harris’s account as true—their constitutional violations were obvious. It

denied summary judgment to Clay County too, finding that there was strong

evidence that Huffman and Scott were final policymakers for the county.

Next, the court addressed the forced medication claim. It granted Huffman

qualified immunity, concluding that Harris did not prove that the sheriff’s

actions violated clearly established law. The court did, however, let the

5

Harris also brought claims against the state court judges, but those claims are not

part of this appeal.

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medication claim proceed against Clay County as municipal liability claims

do not require plaintiffs to prove a violation of clearly established law.

So after summary judgment, the following claims remain: the

detention claim against Huffman, Scott, and Clay County; the forced

medication claim against Clay County alone. Huffman, Scott, and Clay

County appeal.

II

Before we address the merits, we must clear the jurisdictional thicket.

Harris contends we cannot hear any of the defendants’ appeals at this

interlocutory stage. That is right for some but not all defendants.

For this court to have interlocutory jurisdiction, the district court’s

decision as to each defendant must qualify as a collateral order. See Swint v.

Chambers Cnty. Comm’n., 514 U.S. 35, 42 (1995). A collateral order is one

that is “conclusive, that resolve[s] important questions separate from the

merits, and that [is] effectively unreviewable on appeal from the final

judgment in the underlying action.” Id.

The answer is straightforward for the decision denying summary

judgment to Huffman and Scott in their individual capacities. An officer’s

qualified immunity is “an immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to

liability,” and “it is effectively lost if a case is erroneously permitted to go to

trial.” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 526 (1985). The district court’s

denial of summary judgment—based on its determination that the officers

were not entitled to qualified immunity—therefore qualifies as a collateral

order. See id.

That conclusion is not altered by Harris’s argument that we lack

jurisdiction because the district court’s denial turned on a genuine dispute of

material fact. True, this court does not have jurisdiction to decide the

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genuineness of factual disputes. Cole v. Carson, 935 F.3d 444, 452 (5th Cir.

2019) (en banc). But we can determine whether those factual disputes,

viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, are “material to the

application of qualified immunity.” Samples v. Vadzemnieks, 900 F.3d 655,

660 (5th Cir. 2018). And we limit our jurisdiction to just that—whether,

viewing factual disputes in the light most favorable to Harris, Huffman and

Scott violated clearly established law.

Harris is correct, however, that we lack jurisdiction over the ruling

keeping Clay County in the case. Unlike the sheriffs, municipalities do not

enjoy immunity. Owen v. City of Independence, 445 U.S. 622, 638 (1980). The

argument that a municipality does not have a policy or custom that violates

federal law is merely a defense to liability that, like most other defenses, can

be reviewed after final judgment. Burge v. Parish of St. Tammany, 187 F.3d

452, 476 (5th Cir. 1999). We thus have repeatedly refused to treat summary

judgment denials involving municipalities or officers sued in their official

capacities as appealable collateral orders. See Poole v. City of Shreveport, 13

F.4th 420, 423 n.3 (5th Cir. 2021); Trent v. Wade, 776 F.3d 368, 388–89 (5th

Cir. 2015); Kinney v. Weaver, 367 F.3d 337, 347 n.10 (5th Cir. 2004) (en banc).

Nor do we have pendent party jurisdiction over Clay County.

Defendants assume that if Clay County’s liability is “inextricably

intertwined” with that of the individual officers, that provides “support [for]

pendent appellate jurisdiction.” But this court has never permitted—and

has indeed rejected—pendent party (as opposed to pendent claim)

interlocutory jurisdiction. See Johnson v. Bowe, 856 F. App’x 487, 491 n.5

(5th Cir. 2021) (“[T]he discretion to exercise pendent interlocutory

appellate jurisdiction does not include pendent party interlocutory appellate

jurisdiction . . . .”); Zarnow v. City of Wichita Falls, 500 F.3d 401, 407 (5th

Cir. 2007) (refusing to recognize “so strange an animal as pendent party

interlocutory appellate jurisdiction” (citation omitted)); Burge, 187 F.3d at

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477–78 (no pendent party jurisdiction over municipality’s appeal). Other

circuits do sometimes exercise pendent party jurisdiction over orders

involving municipalities when individuals with qualified immunity also

appeal, 6 but we do not. Bryan Lammon, Municipal Piggybacking in Qualified-

Immunity Appeals, 126 Pa. St. L. Rev. 123, 141 (2021) (“[T]he Fifth

Circuit [] appears to have rejected [municipal piggybacking]. . . . I could not

find any Fifth Circuit decisions to the contrary.”).

Often the practical difference in these approaches will be negligible.

If, for example, we rule in an interlocutory appeal of a defendant with

qualified immunity that there is no underlying constitutional violation, then

it should be perfunctory on remand for the district court to enter an order

applying that ruling to the benefit of a municipality. See McKee v. City of

Rockwall, 877 F.2d 409, 413 (5th Cir. 1989) (“[T]he municipality will usually

be able to reap in district court the benefits of a successful appeal by the city’s

individual co-defendants.”). But our rule against pendent party

interlocutory jurisdiction has a greater impact in this case: It means we

cannot consider the forced medication claim that survived only against Clay

County. And, of course, it means that we do not have interlocutory

jurisdiction to decide whether any constitutional violation for detaining

Harris is attributable to the county.

We thus dismiss Clay County’s appeal and proceed to the merits of

the individuals’ appeal.

6

See, e.g., Taffe v. Wengert, 775 F. App’x 459, 462 n.2 (11th Cir. 2019); Novoselsky

v. Brown, 822 F.3d 342, 357 (7th Cir. 2016); Clubside, Inc. v. Valentin, 468 F.3d 144, 161 (2d

Cir. 2006) (Sotomayor, J.); Huskey v. City of San Jose, 204 F.3d 893, 905 (9th Cir. 2000).

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III

The remaining merits issue is whether Huffman and Scott are entitled

to qualified immunity for jailing Harris for six years after courts had found

him incompetent and dismissed the commitment case. We decide that

question de novo, accepting Harris’s version of the facts and drawing

inferences in his favor. Kinney, 367 F.3d at 347–49. The first qualified

immunity question is whether the evidence allows a jury to find that the

defendants violated Harris’s due process rights. See Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 563

U.S. 731, 735 (2011). The second is whether that right is “clearly

established.” Id. An official’s conduct violates a clearly established right

when the “contours of the right [are] sufficiently clear that a reasonable

official would understand that what he is doing violates that right.” Anderson

v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 640 (1987). That clearly established right,

however, cannot be defined “at too high a level of generality.” City of

Tahlequah v. Bond, 142 S. Ct. 9, 11 (2021). It must be “‘particularized’ to the

facts of the case” establishing the right. White v. Pauly, 137 S. Ct. 548, 552

(2017) (quoting Anderson, 483 U.S. at 640).

A

The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a state from confining a

criminal defendant “solely on account of his incapacity to proceed to trial”

for more than “the reasonable period of time necessary to determine whether

there is substantial probability that he will attain that capacity in the

foreseeable future.” Jackson, 406 U.S. at 738. If there is no real probability

that defendant will become competent, the state must institute civil

commitment proceedings—to gauge the dangerousness of the defendant—

or release him. Id.

Harris’s prolonged detention violated Jackson. The circuit court held

that he was incompetent and would not regain competency. Almost

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immediately after that, the chancery court dismissed the civil commitment

proceeding. Without a chance at his competency being restored or a pending

civil proceeding that could result in his commitment based on dangerousness,

Harris was entitled to go free. Yet he remained in jail for six years. This

violated the commit-or-release rule that the Supreme Court recognized a half

century ago. See id.

The sheriffs do not push back much against the notion that the

Constitution required Harris’s release. 7 They instead mostly argue that they

are not responsible for any constitutional violation. Any fault, they contend,

lies with the courts or prosecutor.

Courts, including ours, have rejected jailers’ just-following-orders

defenses in cases with much briefer unlawful detentions. See Jones v. Jackson,

203 F.3d 875 (5th Cir. 2000). Even when a detention was “pursuant to a

valid court order,” we held that detaining a defendant for nine months

without bringing him before a judge offended his due process rights. See id.

at 880–81. A recent case similarly held that “prolonged detention”—96

days—“without the benefit of a court appearance violate[d] the detainee’s

Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.” Jauch v. Choctaw Cty., 874

F.3d 425, 436 (5th Cir. 2017). Other circuits have come to similar

conclusions when defendants were detained at length without being brought

in front of a judge. See Hayes v. Faulkner Cty., 388 F.3d 669, 675 (8th Cir.

2004) (38-day detention); Armstrong v. Squadrito, 152 F.3d 564, 567, 573–76

7

We reject the sheriffs’ argument that the state’s commencement of the

proceedings in 2010 was enough to satisfy the Supreme Court’s command. Jackson would

have no meaning if states could start commitment proceedings, terminate them, and then

jail defendants indefinitely.

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(7th Cir. 1998) (57 days); Oviatt v. Pearce, 954 F.2d 1470, 1474–77 (9th Cir.

1992) (114 days).

Harris did not see a judge from October 2010 to June 2016. During

those more than 2,000 days, the circuit court never set a hearing. And no

case was pending in chancery court. In fact, judges had reason to believe that

Harris was no longer detained. A few days after Harris should have been

released, Huffman and Scott signed the declaration testifying that Harris was

not in the jail (this in a relatively small county with approximately 20,000

citizens and roughly 100 inmates at a given time). That lie allows a factfinder

to infer that Huffman and Scott were covering something up—that they

knew there was no longer any basis to hold Harris. 8 See Reeves v. Sanderson

Plumbing Prods., Inc., 530 U.S. 133, 147 (2000) (discussing the “general

principle of evidence law that the factfinder is entitled to consider a party’s

dishonesty about a material fact as ‘affirmative evidence of guilt’” (quoting

Wright v. West, 505 U.S. 277, 296 (1992)). Thus, the length of time Harris

was held without a pending hearing—substantial as it was—is not the only

basis for tying the sheriffs to the due process violation.

Indeed, this is not a case about jailers’ following court orders that

turned out to be unconstitutional. These sheriffs held Harris in violation of

a court order that followed Jackson’s commit-or-release rule. After its

competency ruling, the circuit court ordered that Harris “shall remain in

custody until the determination of said civil proceedings.” Until that point,

8

Other holes in the sheriffs’ story might also lead a jury to conclude that they knew

it was unlawful to continue holding Harris on the initial charges. For example, Sheriff

Huffman told DA Allgood in 2012 that Harris was still in jail, contradicting his declaration.

And while the sheriffs claim the prison assault capias was their basis for holding Harris, that

could not be the case because the indictment was never served on Harris (and thus there

was never a trial date or any other court hearing relating to that case).

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not longer. That meant that once the chancery court ended the civil

commitment proceedings—and remember it soon did—Harris should have

been released. This case is thus an easier one than the cases cited above in

which jailers should have pieced together the need to release the defendant

based on the passage of time without court action. Here, the court’s order

informed the jailers what due process required. Holding Harris for six more

years violated the court’s instruction.

The sheriffs ignore that commit-or-release order and instead argue

that they were detaining Harris “pursuant” to a different to court order. The

order they refer to is the initial order to detain Harris issued after his bond

hearing in April 2006. It cannot be that the initial detention order in a case

overrides subsequent release orders and allows jailers to indefinitely hold

defendants without consequence. As we said long ago of another sheriff’s

defense to a prolonged detention claim—he argued that his ignorance of a

court’s ordering the defendant’s release excused him from liability—if that

were the law then “nine months could easily be nine years, and those nine

years, ninety-nine years, and still as a matter of law no redress would follow.”

Whirl v. Kern, 407 F.2d 781, 792 (5th Cir. 1968).

Taking the evidence in Harris’s favor, Huffman and Scott violated his

due process right by detaining him for six years in violation of the commit-or-

release rule and the circuit court’s order enforcing that rule.

B

The final question is whether this constitutional violation was clearly

established. The district court answered “yes,” concluding that the sheriffs’

actions were an “obvious” constitutional violation. See Hope v. Pelzer, 536

U.S. 730, 741 (2002); see also Taylor v. Riojas, 141 S. Ct. 52 (2020) (reversing

grant of qualified immunity because the violation was obvious). We agree.

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The commit-or-release rule is fifty years old. The rule has no wiggle

room; its line is as bright as they come: An incompetent defendant who has

no reasonable expectation of restored competency must be civilly committed

or released. Jackson, 406 U.S. at 738. It is also clear as day that Harris’s

detention after the October 2010 dismissal of his civil proceeding violated

Jackson’s rule.

And it has long been the law that sheriffs can be held responsible for

unlawful detentions, especially when a court order tells them that the

detainee should be released. See, e.g., Whirl, 407 F.2d at 792. That is the

case here, as the circuit court’s order informed the jailers that Harris should

remain detained only so long as his commitment proceeding was pending.

Detaining Harris for more than six years after he should have been

released under Supreme Court precedent and a state court order is a violation

of clearly established law. Qualified immunity thus does not protect Huffman

and Scott.

***

We DISMISS Clay County’s appeal for lack of jurisdiction and

AFFIRM the district court’s denial of summary judgment as to Huffman

and Scott.

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