PHILADELPHIA - The City of Philadelphia won't be penalized for a prison attack that left one man paralyzed.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on March 7 ruled against plaintiff Richard Hightower and his lawyers at Kline & Specter, as they sought to blame the City and staff at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility for a 2019 assault between cellmates mistakenly placed together.
Hightower, arrested on charges of a non-violent crime, was paired with Anthony Tyler during intake. Tyler had a history of violence - even in prisons - and had been arrested for aggravated assault, terroristic threats and recklessly endangering another person.
The result of sticking the two together was an attack that paralyzed Hightower.
"Not every jail tragedy makes a municipality liable," Judge Stephanos Bibas started his opinion.
Hightower's attorneys needed to show Philadelphia had a custom or policy in place that deprived him of his civil rights - a so-called Monell claim. Their September 2021 complaint attempted to do that by alleging the City knew its current procedures resulted in improper placement of inmates.
It also said Philadelphia failed to properly train officers on how to handle inmates with violent tendencies and how to break up a fight.
"Hightower says the city can be liable even absent any pattern because Tyler's attack was such an obvious consequence of the city's failure to reshuffle inmates in intake after classification," Bibas wrote.
"But this single incident of a higher-classification inmate assaulting a lower-classification one is not enough to hold the city liable.
"Hightower suffered greatly. But the city cannot be held liable."
Hightower was charged with burglary and was classified as the second-lowest of four security risk classes during intake. Tyler was classified as the highest, considering he had beaten his cellmate, slapped a guard and destroyed prison property during a previous incarceration.
Tyler was recovering from stab wounds in the infirmary before he was placed in Hightower's cell. He was supposed to head to a permanent cell, but the company providing prison health services accidentally sent him back to intake.
Tyler threatened Hightower when he arrived in the cell. They argued over the volume of a television before Hightower fell asleep.
The next day, Tyler told an officer "If I can't get out of this cell, I'm going to kill my cellee."
He pulled Hightower off the top bunk and punched and kicked him while the guard radioed for backup. The officer pepper-sprayed Tyler, but he had had enough time to paralyze Hightower.
Unfortunately for Hightower, the Third Circuit said no reasonable jury could find Philadelphia liable for his injuries. He failed to show it had an unconstitutional policy or custom or was deliberately indifferent to his rights, it said.
"(T)he city did have a... written intake policy that, if followed, would have prevented this attack; Tyler should have gone from the infirmary straight to the general jail population," Bibas wrote.
"But the city is not liable just because its employees did not follow this policy."