The Trump administration is pushing the Supreme Court to strip federal prisoners of a key way to sue prison staff over medical neglect, and at Monday’s oral arguments, the court appeared ready to go along. The shift could make federal officers even harder to hold accountable when they mistreat the people in their custody.
The Supreme Court was looking to rein in suits from federal inmates over claims of substandard medical care at the hands of prison officials, a move that would chip away at the legal precedent long used to make federal law enforcement answerable for constitutional transgressions, the Washington Post reported.
The justices on Monday seemed set to throw out the suit of Kekai Watanabe, an ex-inmate who said a nurse at the Honolulu federal detention center did not properly treat him for a broken tailbone sustained in a gang-related assault during a riot. Yet they did not appear prepared to issue a broader ruling that would undo the 1971 precedent entitling those wronged by federal officers in violation of their constitutional rights to sue for monetary damages.
In Watanabe’s case, the prison nurse’s lawyers have been making that argument and trying to overturn the 1971 Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics decision. That has given pause to inmate and immigration advocates who fear the demise of the Bivens precedent would leave less room to hold to account not only prison guards but also ICE agents when they break the law. Watanabe’s matter is being heard while allegations against immigration officers are on the rise with the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.
In recent years, the high court has been steadily curbing the Bivens precedent. The Trump administration is asking it to put an end to a subsequent precedent that built on Bivens to let prisoners sue under the Eighth Amendment for deliberate indifference to their medical needs.
The administration is not calling for Bivens to be overturned in its entirety. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is frequently in the majority, and some of his colleagues appeared to side with the administration. “It could be viewed as a cautious, incremental approach to such a fundamental question,” Roberts observed in oral arguments on Monday. A few conservative justices noted other avenues for inmates to seek redress for bad medical care, such as the Federal Tort Claims Act, which permits suits against the federal government but not its employees. For his part, Lucas M. Walker, attorney for the nurse Francis Nielsen, contended the Bivens precedent was a violation of the separation of powers.
