REVISED OPINION - 7/25/2000
IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
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No. 99-50316
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ROBERT D. SIKES,
Plaintiff-Appellee-Cross-Appellant,
versus
JUAN F. GAYTAN, Individually and
in his Official Capacity as a Guard,
Defendant-Appellant-Cross-Appellee.
_________________________________________________________________
Appeals from the United States District Court for the
Western District of Texas
_________________________________________________________________
July 25, 2000
Before REYNALDO G. GARZA, JOLLY, and HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judges.
E. GRADY JOLLY, Circuit Judge:
In this section 1983 appeal, Robert Sikes, a Texas prisoner,
claims that Juan Gaytan, a Texas prison guard, used excessive force
against him and thereby violated his Eighth Amendment rights to be
free of cruel and unusual punishment. Sikes proved to a jury that
on August 22, 1995, he was severely beaten by the defendant, a
sergeant at the Connally Unit. Specifically, Sikes presented
evidence that, following his altercation with a prison guard (after
which Sikes spit on the guard), Gaytan handcuffed him, took him to
the ground, punched him in the face five or six times, and then
repeatedly jumped up and down on his left arm until he heard a loud
pop. As a result of this assault, Sikes suffered a dislocated left
shoulder, injuries to his left elbow, conjunctival hemorrhaging to
his left eye, loss of vision in his left eye, and severe bruising
and lacerations to his face. Additionally, he produced evidence
that he suffers from posttraumatic stress syndrome resulting from
this assault.
The jury returned a verdict against Gaytan in his individual
capacity, finding that he had used excessive force against Sikes in
violation of his Eighth Amendment rights. On appeal, Gaytan seeks
review of the district court’s denial of a separate jury
interrogatory on the defense of qualified immunity.1
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Additionally, Gaytan appeals (1) the sufficiency of the
evidence supporting the trial court’s decision to instruct the jury
on future damages and medical expenses, and (2) the amount of the
punitive damages award. The record reveals ample evidence on the
issue of future damages to support the district court’s decision to
instruct the jury in this regard, and to support the jury’s award
of damages. See Esposito v. Davis, 47 F.3d 164, 167 (5th Cir.
1995)(stating that “there is no abuse of discretion in denying a
motion for new trial unless there is [a] complete absence of
evidence to support the verdict”). Further, when the amount of the
punitive damages award is evaluated in the light of the Supreme
Court’s decision in BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore, 517 U.S.
559 (1996), it is clear that the award is not excessive. See id.
at 574-75.
On cross-appeal, Sikes seeks review of the amount of
attorney’s fees awarded by the trial court. The record shows that
the court did not abuse its discretion by: (1) reducing the amount
of recoverable fees on fees; and (2) reducing the award of
attorney’s fees by ten percent due to failure of Sikes to succeed
on his claims against Gaytan in his official capacity. See Riley
v. City of Jackson, 99 F.3d 757, 759 (5th Cir. 1996)(stating that
“this court reviews the district court’s award of attorney’s fees
Gaytan argues that the trial court erred when it denied his
request to submit separate jury interrogatories on the issues of
whether he violated Sikes’s constitutional rights and whether his
actions were reasonable. Although Gaytan does not identify any
authority to support his assertion that a separate jury
interrogatory was required, he argues that the court confused the
jury by submitting the issues in one jury interrogatory.
The trial court denied Gaytan’s request to submit separate
interrogatories based on its belief that “the submission of the
issue of liability and qualified immunity as one issue eliminated
the concern of irreconcilability.” In reaching this conclusion,
the court was guided by our decision in Snyder v. Trepagnier, 142
F.3d 791 (5th Cir. 1998), in which we discussed the potential
conflict created by submitting separate jury interrogatories on
liability and qualified immunity.
In Snyder, the district court submitted separate jury
interrogatories on the issues of whether the defendant violated the
plaintiff’s constitutional rights and whether the actions of the
defendant were reasonable. Id. at 800. The jury returned what
appeared to be an irreconcilable verdict--finding that the
defendant had violated the constitutional rights of the plaintiff,
but that the defendant’s actions were reasonable. Id. Based on
these answers, however, the district court granted qualified
authorized by statute for abuse of discretion”).
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immunity to the defendant. Id. On appeal, we addressed the issue
of whether there was an inherent conflict between a finding that
the plaintiff’s constitutional rights were violated and a finding
that the defendant, in violation those rights, acted reasonable.
Id. The court, relying on Judge Higginbotham’s concurrence in
Melear v. Spears, 862 F.2d 1177, 1187-88 (5th Cir. 1989)(stating
that “it is possible for a jury to find that, although the actual
circumstances of the search did not justify the officer’s behavior,
the circumstances that appeared to the officer would have justified
a search,” and thus the officer was shielded from liability by
qualified immunity), held that “there is no internal conflict in
the verdict.” Id. at 801.
In the course of the Snyder opinion, the court stated that:
“A related question is whether the issues of liability and
qualified immunity should have been fashioned as one issue or, as
the district court submitted them, as two issues.” Id. at 800.
Although the Snyder court did not specifically address this
question, Snyder can be read, as noted by Judge Garza in his able
dissent, to implicitly permit “a trial court to combine qualified
immunity and the liability issue in the same jury charge.” It is
clear, however, that regardless of whether the trial court submits
the issues of liability and qualified immunity in one or two
interrogatories, the central focus is on whether the trial court
correctly and clearly instructed the jury. In making this
determination, jury interrogatories are considered “in conjunction
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with the general [jury] charge” to determine if “the
interrogatories adequately presented the contested issues to the
jury.” Barton’s Disposal Service, Inc. v. Tiger Corp., 886 F.2d
1430, 1435 (5th Cir. 1989)(citing Dreiling v. General Electric,
Co., 511 F.2d 768, 774 (5th Cir. 1975)).
In the case at bar, the court was very clear in instructing
the jury on the defense of qualified immunity:
If you find that the plaintiff has proven his claim,
you must then consider the defendant’s defense that his
conduct was objectively reasonable in the light of the
legal rules clearly established at the time of the
incident in issue and that the defendant is therefore not
liable.
If, after considering the scope of discretion and
responsibility generally given to prison officials in the
performance of their duties, you find from a
preponderance of the evidence that the plaintiff has
proved either (1) that the defendant was plainly
incompetent, or (2) he knowingly violated the law
regarding the plaintiff’s constitutional rights, you must
find for the plaintiff. If, however, you find that the
defendant had a reasonable belief that his actions did
not violate the constitutional rights of the plaintiff,
then you cannot find him liable even if the plaintiff’s
rights were in fact violated as a result of the
defendant’s objectively reasonable action.
(Emphasis added). Thus, the question we must address is whether
the court abused its discretion in deciding to combine the issues
of liability and qualified immunity into a single interrogatory.
See Barton’s, 886 F.2d at 1434 (stating that “a trial court is
afforded great latitude in the framing and structure of the
instructions and the special interrogatories given to the
jury, . . . [and we will not] disturb that discretion absent a
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showing of abuse of discretion”). The court gave the following
interrogatory:
Considering all of the instruction in the jury charge, do
you find that Plaintiff Robert D. Sikes proved by a
preponderance of the evidence that on August 22, 1995,
Defendant Juan F. Gaytan violated Plaintiff’s Eighth
Amendment constitutional right to be free from cruel and
unusual punishment.
In denying the defendant’s request for a separate jury
interrogatory on qualified immunity, the trial court concluded that
giving separate interrogatories created the possibility of
confusing the jury, resulting in the return of “irreconcilable”
answers. It is plausible that a jury could be confused by an
interrogatory asking whether the force Gaytan used against Sikes
amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, and then being asked in
an immediately following interrogatory whether the conduct of
Gaytan was reasonable. Indeed, finding that the force used against
Sikes was cruel and unusual would ordinarily seem to preclude the
possibility of a finding that actions of Gaytan were reasonable.
Still, we are constrained also to say that a plausible argument can
be made that a separate interrogatory on qualified immunity,
supported by a clear jury instruction, arguably could clarify
rather than confuse the issue before the jury. In the light of
this equipoise, we must conclude that the district court did not
abuse its discretion in this case by giving a single jury
instruction on the issues of liability and qualified immunity.
The judgment of the district court is in all respects
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A F F I R M E D.
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REYNALDO G. GARZA, Circuit Judge, dissenting:
The majority concluded that Gaytan’s challenge to the
district court’s failure to give a separate interrogatory on
the issue of qualified immunity lacked merit. I respectfully
dissent because Gaytan has satisfied his burden of
demonstrating that the absence of a separate interrogatory on
qualified immunity “misled, prejudiced, or confused” the jury.
See Whitehead v. Food Max of Miss., Inc., 163 F.3d 265, 272
(5th Cir. 1998) (citations omitted). Although the district
court instructed the jury on the basic elements of the defense
of qualified immunity in the general jury charge, a separate
interrogatory was necessary given the facts of this case to
avoid jury confusion.
Several factors support my conclusion. First, qualified
immunity was the central issue of the prison guard’s defense
in this Section 1983 case. In fact, it is often the crux of
such cases. The more important an issue, the more we should
require that jury instructions and special interrogatories
direct the jury’s attention to that issue. We should
therefore be especially concerned that the trial court failed
to draw the jury’s attention to this issue in the jury
instructions and in a separate special interrogatory.
In that light, several failures to direct the jury’s
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attention to the qualified immunity issue trouble me in this
case. First, the jury instructions did not even use the term
“qualified immunity.” Second, the jury instructions merely
used qualified immunity-type language as part of a single
paragraph on liability. Third, there was no separate special
interrogatory which told the jury to consider qualified
immunity.
Fourth, and perhaps most troubling, even if we give the
instructions the benefit of the doubt, we will find that the
jury charge and the interrogatories are inconsistent. Let us
say we assume that the jury charge provided to the jury
instructions on both excessive force and qualified immunity
but an interrogatory only as to excessive force. The jury
could well have understood the difference between the
substantive claim of excessive force and defense of qualified
immunity, but then could have been confused as to the odd
disappearance of qualified immunity in the interrogatories.
In other words, assuming that the jury instructions explain
that liability in this case had two prongs, i.e. that Sike’s
Eighth Amendment rights were violated and that the officer’s
behavior was unreasonable, the interrogatory contradicted the
instructions when it told the jurors that they only need find
that Sike’s Eight Amendment rights were violated in order to
find Gaytan liable. Accordingly, the First Interrogatory
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states: “Considering all of the instructions in the jury
charge, do you find that Plaintiff Robert D. Sikes proved by
a preponderance of the evidence that on August 22, 1995,
Defendant Juan F. Gaytan violated Plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment
constitutional right to be free from cruel and unusual
punishment?” This was all the interrogatory said, and no
other interrogatory spoke to liability.
This is especially troubling because my experience of 18
years on the trial bench and over 21 years on the appellate
bench show that a jury will often miss important issues when
the interrogatories fail to focus the jury’s attention on the
issue. We should be less tolerant of the risk that the jury
will be confused into overlooking such a central issue. Even
if Snyder permits a trial court to combine qualified immunity
and the liability issue in the same jury interrogatory, it
does not permit a trial court to confuse the jury by
completely deleting qualified immunity from any of the jury
interrogatories. See Snyder v. Trepagnier, 142 F.3d 791, 800
(5th Cir. 1998), reh’g and reh’g en banc denied, 149 F.3d 1181
(5th Cir.), cert. dismissed, 119 S.Ct. 1493 (1999). Snyder
certainly does not permit interrogatories which, because they
are inconsistent with the jury instructions, suggest that the
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qualified immunity issue has dropped out of play.2 Given the
facts of this case, we should require that qualified immunity
be discussed in a separate special interrogatory. At a
minimum, we should require that the jury instructions and
interrogatories do not actively mislead the jury into
believing that the qualified immunity issue has dropped out of
consideration.
We will never know if the jury would have granted Gaytan
qualified immunity under the facts of this case because there
was no separate interrogatory to draw the jury’s attention to
the objective legal reasonableness of his conduct. Gaytan
raised factual issues regarding the force used after removing
Sikes from his cell. First, Gaytan showed that Sikes
demonstrated aggressive, menacing behavior, even spitting at
him in an assaultive manner. Second, Gaytan presented expert
testimony that Gaytan acted in accordance with the prison’s
policies and procedures in pulling Sikes to the ground to
subdue him. Thus, Gaytan brought evidence from which a jury
could find that he reasonably believed that the forced applied
2
The majority citation to Barton’s Disposal Service, Inc.
v. Tiger Corp., 886 F.2d 1430, 1435 (5th Cir. 1989), is not on
point. Barton’s stands for the proposition that jury
interrogatories are considered in conjunction with the jury charge
to determine whether they accurately convey the law as a whole.
Barton’s does not address this case where the interrogatories and
jury instructions are arguably inconsistent, or at least confusing
when taken together.
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to Sikes was reasonable. We have no reason to be confident,
however, that the jury considered these facts to determine
whether Gaytan acted in accordance with the reasonableness
standard and was thus entitled to qualified immunity. This is
so because there is no separate interrogatory and the
interrogatory that we do have actively misleads the jury away
from qualified immunity. Therefore, I respectfully dissent.
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