holding that pretrial detainees possess a constitutional right against deliberate indifference to their serious medical needs because the due process rights of a pretrial detainee are “at least as great as the Eighth Amendment protections available to a convicted prisoner”
How later courts described this case
- holding that pretrial detainees possess a constitutional right against deliberate indifference to their serious medical needs because the due process rights of a pretrial detainee are “at least as great as the Eighth Amendment protections available to a convicted prisoner”
- explaining that the Fourteenth Amendment provides the applicable standard for evaluating the medical care of pretrial detainees, while the Eighth Amendment provides the applicable standard for evaluating the medical care of adults in custody who have already been convicted
- explaining that the Eighth Amendment “has no application” until the government obtains a “formal adjudication of guilt,” and that pretrial detainees’ rights “are at least as great as the Eighth Amendment protections available to . . . convicted prisoner[s]”
- holding that the Due Process Clause requires the government to provide medical care to persons injured while being apprehended by the police, and Eighth Amendment is not applicable “because there has been no formal adjudication of guilt”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Justice Rehnquist,
with whom Justice White joins, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I see no reason to decide in this case what requirements the Due Process Clause may impose upon a governmental agency by way of providing medical care to persons who have been injured while being apprehended by the police. As the Court points out, “[wjhatever the standard may be, Revere fulfilled its constitutional obligation by seeing that Kivlin was taken promptly to a hospital that provided the treatment necessary for his injury.” Ante, at 245. The Court’s other statements regarding the application of the Due Process Clause in this situation, ante, at 244-245 and this page, are therefore unnecessary as well as largely unsupported.
I concur in Parts I, II, III-A, and IV of the Court’s opinion.