Page 3
Ninth Circuit Declines to Revive Suit Over Prison Stabbing
Opinion Says Immunity Protects Officials Who Decided to Transfer Inmate With History of Planning Assaults on Child Molesters to Unit Housing Sex-Offender Fashion Icon Who Was Later Attacked
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
|
|
|
ANAND JON ALEXANDER plaintiff |
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has held that qualified immunity protects prison officials from liability over a stabbing that followed a decision to transfer an inmate—who had previously knifed another convict that he believed to be a child molester and was accused of planning another similar attack ten years later—to a unit used to house sex offenders and other “sensitive” prisoners.
After the transfer in 2018, the relocated inmate, Dominic Rizzo, allegedly stabbed fellow prisoner Anand Jon Alexander, who was once a high-profile Beverly Hills-based fashion designer featured on “America’s Next Top Model” before he was sentenced to 59 years to life in prison in 2009 for sexually assaulting several young women and girls he enticed with the promise of modeling careers.
Alexander says he suffered multiple stab wounds to his face and eye during the May 2019 attack.
In Tuesday’s memorandum opinion, signed by Circuit Judges Eric D. Miller and Jennifer Sung and Senior Circuit Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz, the court said that it was not “clearly established” in 2018 that the decision to transfer would violate the plaintiff’s constitutional rights, as required to overcome an assertion of qualified immunity. They wrote:
“In 2018, the Defendants approved a behavioral override allowing Rizzo…to be placed in a lower-security facility and recommended his transfer to the…Sensitive Needs Yard…, where Alexander was housed. Sensitive Needs Yards house inmates with ‘systemic safety concerns,’ such as sex offenders and gang dropouts. In 2003, Rizzo stabbed an inmate whom he believed to be a ‘child molester.’…In 2014, officers discovered a nine-inch-long ‘inmate manufactured weapon’ in Rizzo’s cell, which an informant stated Rizzo had planned to use to stab a ‘child molester or drug dealer.’ ”
Finding an absence of case law to establish that the decision-making process that led to Rizzo’s transfer to the sex-offender housing, based on good behavior since 2015, violated the constitutional rights of other inmates, the court affirmed the judgment in favor of the defendants.
Complaint Filed
The question arose after Alexander filed a complaint under 42 U.S.C. §1983 against then-Secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Ralph Diaz and several other prison officials who played a role in the transfer decision, asserting failure to protect and deliberate indifference claims under the Eighth Amendment and a cause of action for negligence under state law.
In the January 2020 pleading, Alexander alleged: “CDCR and the Defendants failed to protect Mr. ALEXANDER, by knowingly allowing a known violent…assailant to be housed with, and have open access to, Mr. ALEXANDER, a…low risk inmate with no history of violence classified as a sensitive needs inmate. At no time should these two inmates have been on the same yard, much less the same floor, at the same time.”
After District Court Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo of the Southern District of California granted the defendant’s motion for summary judgment in 2022, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the order except as it applied to four officials involved in the decision to transfer Rizzo—Corey Cross, Karl E. Gerther, Lindsey Gervasoni, and Gabriel Menchaca—saying that “a reasonable jury could conclude that…Rizzo posed a substantial risk of serious harm to sex offenders.”
The decision did not address qualified immunity, an issue raised by the remaining defendants on remand.
Summary Judgment
In April 2024, Bencivengo found that the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity, granted defense motions for summary judgment, and declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the remaining negligence claim. She wrote:
“In deciding whether a government official is entitled to qualified immunity, the Supreme Court has articulated a two-prong approach: first, whether the officer’s conduct violated a constitutional right; and second, whether the officer’s conduct violated ‘clearly established law.’ ”
Bencivengo noted that the defendants were not involved in any specific housing decisions, having only approved the removal of certain behavioral qualifications that would have otherwise made Rizzo ineligible for placement in the plaintiff’s unit, and remarked:
“[T]hese particular Defendants…were not aware of Plaintiff or his specific vulnerability….Thus, there is nothing in the law that would have made it clear to a reasonable officer, knowing what each Defendant knew…, that approving a behavioral override for Rizzo posed such a substantial risk of serious harm that doing so would be constitutionally impermissible.”
Ninth Circuit’s View
Miller Sung and Hurwitz noted disagreement with Bencivengo’s reasoning, saying that “[t]o the extent the district court found on remand that the Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity because they were not aware of a risk of harm to Alexander in particular, we disagree,” and cited case law holding that a prison official cannot escape liability by showing an unawareness of any threats to a specific inmate posed by a violent prisoner.
They wrote:
“The narrow question before us…is whether it was ‘clearly established’ in 2018 that the Defendants’ conduct would violate the Eighth Amendment, such that ‘every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right.’ ”
Pointing out that the plaintiff bears the burden of showing that the right at issue was “clearly established,” they said:
“Alexander identifies no case…establishing that transfer of Rizzo to a different Sensitive Needs Yard in a lower-security facility after the review process the Defendants conducted would violate the Eighth Amendment.”
The judges added:
“The Defendants approved Rizzo’s transfer following an annual review of his housing placement, during which they evaluated his ‘case factors’ and behavioral history while incarcerated. They noted Rizzo’s ‘positive behavior,’ lack of disciplinary incident since 2015, and participation in multiple rehabilitative programs. The Defendants recommended Rizzo’s placement [at the Sensitive Needs Yard] because he had no ‘documented enemies’ there. Alexander was not identified in departmental records as one of Rizzo’s enemies. On the facts of this case, it would not have been clear to ‘every reasonable official’…that the Defendants’ conduct was unconstitutional.”
The case is Alexander v. Cross, 24-2942.
Copyright 2025, Metropolitan News Company