A Little-Noticed Supreme Court Case Could Deny Justice For Sandra Bland

In Taylor v. Barkes, all nine justices shut down a lawsuit by family members of Christopher Barkes, a Delaware man who took his own life within a day of being arrested for violating probation. Jail officials' failure to set up safeguards to keep him from hanging himself, the court ruled, was not a violation of his civil rights.

Barkes had a history of “suicidal ideations” and had attempted suicide on several occasions. This and a fuller mental-health picture were contained in Barkes’ probation file. But the intake nurse at the Howard R. Young Correctional Institution in Wilmington, Delaware, had no access to it, and Barkes only told her about one of these attempts. There also was evidence that the nurse didn’t use the latest version of a standard suicide screening form, and that a qualified mental-health professional should have conducted the screening instead.

The night before his death, Barkes called his wife and told her he "can't live this way any more," and planned to take this life. The next morning, while still in custody, he hanged himself.

This failure to properly screen Barkes and take steps to prevent his suicide, his family charged, amounted to cruel and unusual punishment -- a violation of his Eighth Amendment rights.

But a unanimous Supreme Court disagreed. “No decision of this court establishes a right to the proper implementation of adequate suicide prevention protocols,” the court said in a short, unsigned opinion that was decided without briefing or oral arguments. “No decision of this court even discusses suicide screening or prevention protocols.”

In other words, Barkes had no right to be kept alive while in custody.

If that sounds harsh, it’s because the dirty little secret of the case is that it was less about “a troubled man with a long history of mental health and substance abuse problems,” as the court put it, and more about the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity, a legal shield the Supreme Court created decades ago to protect government officials accused of constitutional wrongdoing.

The law of qualified immunity is thorny and rife with controversy. But as characterized by the court, its purpose is as simple as it is overarching: It “protects all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law” from being sued. And not just any law, but “clearly established” law at the time of the violation.

A Little-Noticed Supreme Court Case Could Deny Justice For Sandra Bland