holding that placing an inmate on death row before he was tried violated inmate’s due process rights if done for the purpose of punishment
How later courts described this case
- holding that placing an inmate on death row before he was tried violated inmate’s due process rights if done for the purpose of punishment
- affirming trial court denial of summary judgment where genuine issues of fact existed as to reasons officials placed plaintiff on death row, in part, due to issue of whether officers lied concerning their reasons
- denying qualified immunity to officials who confined pretrial detainee on death row before his trial in order to punish him, despite the absence of any factually-similar precedent
- police officers were accused of deliberately placing exculpatory evidence relevant in one case into another investigative file for the purpose of concealing it from prosecutors
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
PROPST, District Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I concur in the court’s opinion, except as to the holding in the last paragraph of section IV.D.2. There, the court holds that the district court erred in assessing the evidence’s materiality from a post-trial perspective rather than from the perspective of a reasonable official in the position of Tate, Ikner, and Benson. I think that the district court implicitly, if not explicitly, considered “whether every reasonable official in the position of Tate, Ikner, and Benson would understand that withholding those particular pieces of evidence would undermine confidence in the outcome of McMillian’s trial.” It is hard to see how a holding that evidence is “clearly exculpatory” could suggest anything else.