Ralph Diaz, et al. v. Patricia Polanco, et al.

This Court has “repeatedly told courts—and the Ninth Circuit in particular—not to define clearly established law at a high level of generality” for purposes of the qualified immunity inquiry. Kisela v. Hughes, 138 S. Ct. 1148, 1152 (2018) (per curiam) (internal quotation marks omitted). “The dispositive question is ‘whether the violative nature of particular conduct is clearly established.’” Mullenix v. Luna, 577 U.S. 7, 12 (2015) (per curiam). This petition concerns four recent appeals in which the Ninth Circuit denied qualified immunity in suits arising out of an outbreak of COVID-19 at a state prison. See Sup. Ct. R. 12.4. In Polanco v. Diaz, the panel majority held that prison officials violated a substantive due process right that was “clearly established” after pointing to “the combination of two of our precedents”—neither of which involved any sort of infectious disease. App. 17a. Two months later, the Ninth Circuit denied qualified immunity in Hampton v. California, this time holding that “the proper level of generality” in assessing an inmate’s Eighth Amendment claim was “an inmate’s right to be free from exposure to a serious disease.” Id. at 101a-102a. A few days later, the Ninth Circuit invoked the “clearly established” right described in Hampton to deny qualified immunity with respect to nine additional prisoner lawsuits. Id. at 184a-185a. The question presented is: Whether the Ninth Circuit improperly denied qualified immunity to prison officials in these cases by defining the relevant law at a high level of generality and failing to identify any precedent recognizing a constitutional violation on similar facts.