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 Stevens,
concurring in the judgment.
This case raises a question of state fiscal policy. If the Mayor of the City of Revere had paid this bill because he had been advised by his attorney, or by the Attorney General of *247 the State, that it was an obligation of the municipality, we would have had no interest in the matter, even if the legal advice had misinterpreted federal law. If the Massachusetts Legislature had passed a statute requiring bills of this character to be paid by the city, the performance of a city’s state statutory obligation would give rise to no federal question. That would be true even if the legislative history of the statute made it perfectly clear that every lawmaker who voted for the bill did so because he believed that the Federal Constitution required the State to allocate the cost in this manner.
Because the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts— rather than another branch of state government — invoked the Federal Constitution in imposing an expense on the City of Revere, this Court has the authority to review the decision. But is it a sensible exercise of discretion to wield that authority? I think not. There is “nothing in the Federal Constitution that prohibits a State from giving lawmaking power to its courts.” Minnesota v. Clover Leaf Creamery Co., 449 U. S. 456, 479 (1981) (Stevens, J., dissenting). No individual right was violated in this case. The underlying issue of federal law has never before been deemed an issue of national significance. Since, however, the Court did (unwisely in my opinion) grant certiorari, I join its judgment. *
I agree with the Court’s substantive analysis of this case, except for its assertion that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment would not be violated by the State’s imposition of cruel and unusual punishment on a prisoner before he has been convicted of a crime. I adhere to my views that the statements in support of that assertion in Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U. S. 651 (1977), and Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U. S. 520 (1979), simply cannot be squared with the text or the purpose of the Eighth Amendment. See Ingraham, supra, at 684-692 (White, J., dissenting).