Supreme Court to weigh rights of federal prison inmates to sue over lack of medical treatment

WASHINGTON — Taking up a case that could further erode the rights of people to sue federal officers for constitutional violations, the Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider whether a prison inmate could sue a nurse for failing to provide medical assistance after a riot.

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The case concerns a lawsuit brought by Kekai Watanabe, who claims he was denied medical treatment following a riot at a federal prison in Honolulu in July 2021.

The justices will consider the scope of a 1980 Supreme Court ruling called Carlson v. Green that said federal prison inmates could sue officials for deliberate indifference to their medical needs under the Constitution’s 8th Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment.

Watanabe said he asked Francis Nielsen, a nurse at the facility, to be taken to the hospital after complaining about pain. He says he was denied treatment other than over-the-counter pain medication.

Watanabe was later diagnosed with a fractured coccyx and was found to have bone chips embedded in surrounding soft tissue. He was ultimately referred to a specialist.

He then sued, claiming that his 8th Amendment rights were violated.

A federal court rejected Watanabe’s lawsuit, but the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived it in a September 2024 ruling.

At the center of the case is whether the Supreme Court believes the 1980 precedent can be broadly applied to similar incidents.

That ruling was a rare occasion in which the court expanded on a decision from nine years earlier called Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, which first found that people could sue federal officials for constitutional violations.

But since then the Supreme Court has over several decades shown a reluctance to allow what have been dubbed “Bivens claims.”

In one recent decision, the court in 2022 said Border Patrol agents could not be sued.

In the 12 months after that ruling, lower courts cited it 228 times in a variety of cases against all kinds of federal officials, an NBC News investigation found . In 195 of those cases, constitutional claims were dismissed.

Last year the court ruled against a prison inmate seeking to sue corrections officers for an alleged assault in another case involving a Bivens claim.

Although legislation has been proposed in Congress, lawmakers have never enacted a law that would specifically allow federal officials to be sued individually for constitutional violations. A longstanding federal law allows similar claims to be brought against state and local officials.