Nicole Sanchez, et al. v. Young County, Texas, et al.

In Kingsley v. Hendrickson, the Court made clear that only objective considerations should apply when deciding 42 U.S.C. § 1983 excessive-force claims brought under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because “pretrial detainees (unlike convicted prisoners) cannot be punished at all.” The Fifth Circuit, in affirming the district court’s summary judgment, applied a subjective deliberate indifference standard, requiring Petitioners to show that Young County jailers subjectively intended that harm occur to Diana Simpson, a pretrial detainee, who was arrested for public intoxication after admitting to ingesting twenty-four capsules of seven different prescription drugs with alcohol but was left alone in a cell where she died hours later. Should the Fifth Circuit have applied an objective standard to determine whether the actions or inactions of jail personnel amounted to deliberate indifference of a pretrial detainee’s serious medical needs under the Fourteenth Amendment? As the Sixth and Seventh Circuits have explicitly acknowledged, this question post-Kingsley has hopelessly divided the courts of appeals. The Second, Third, and Ninth Circuits require only objective deliberate indifference; the Fifth Circuit and five other circuits require subjective deliberate indifference.