Antonio M. Smith v. John Kind, et al.

In an effort to stop Petitioner Antonio Smith’s hunger strike, prison officials left him in a cell for 23 hours, naked and without heat, at temperatures that dropped to 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Petitioner challenged the officials’ conduct under the Eighth Amendment. A Seventh Circuit panel unanimously held that housing Petitioner in those conditions violated his Eighth Amendment rights because the record would support a finding that the officials were deliberately indifferent to the health risks inherent in Petitioner’s exposure to the extraordinary cold, “left naked in a frigid cell overnight.” But, over a vigorous dissent, the panel majority granted these officials qualified immunity. The majority acknowledged that “inmates have a well-established constitutional right to protection from extreme cold.” The court nevertheless held that no case “squarely governs” here, and the officials therefore enjoy qualified immunity, because the Seventh Circuit had never specifically held that it violates the Eighth Amendment “to house an inmate in a cell that ranged in temperature from 25 to 57 degrees over a 23-hour period without clothes or a way to keep warm.” The question presented is: When a government official acts in an obviously unconstitutional manner, is that sufficient for the violation to be clearly established, as this Court has held and other Circuits have ruled in analogous circumstances, or is a violation clearly established only if there is binding precedent in a factually indistinguishable case, as the Seventh Circuit required here?