37 F. Supp. 2d 855 - Ruiz v. Johnson’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

4 federal appellate · 2 district ·

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “I’m talking about forms of behavior that are easily recognizable and that are stark in nature when you see them, when you look at them, when you’re exposed to them. In a number of instances, there were people who had . smeared themselves with feces. In other instances, there were people who had urinated in their cells, and the urination was on the floor... .There were many people who were incoherent when I attempted to talk to them, babbling, sometimes shrieking, other people who appeared to be full of fury and anger and rage and were, in some instances, banging their hands on the side of the wall and yelling and screaming, other people who appeared to be simply disheveled, withdrawn and out of contact with the circumstances or surroundings. Some of them would be huddled in the back corner of the cell and appeared incom-municative when I attempted to speak with them. Again, these were not subtle diagnostic issues. These were people who appeared to be in profound states of distress and pain. The bedlam which ensued each time I walked out into one of those units, the number of people who were screaming, who were begging for help, for attention, the number of people who appeared to be disturbed, the existence, again, of people who were smeared with feces, the intensity of the noise as people began to shout and ask, Please come over here. Please talk to me. Please help me. It was shattering. And as I discussed this atmosphere with the people who worked here, I was told that this ”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 154 F. Supp. 2d 975 - Ruiz v. Johnson

2. “The plaintiffs have shown by a preponderance of the evidence both the objective and subjective elements of an Eighth Amendment claim for failure to reasonably protect them from harm.... [T]he combination of inmates who are routinely subjected to violence, -extortion, and rape; of officers who are aware of inmate-on-inmate victimization but fail to respond to the victims; of high barriers preventing inmates from seeking safekeeping or protective custody; and of a system that fails accurately to report, among other data, instances of requests for safekeeping and sexual assaults; and, as well, the obviousness of the risk to prison officials, when taken together, have the mutually enforcing effect of rendering prison conditions cruel and unusual by denying inmates safety from their fellow inmates.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. 154 F. Supp. 2d 975 - Ruiz v. Johnson

3. “It is deplorable and outrageous that this state’s prisons appear to have become a repository for a great number of its mentally ill citizens. Persons who, with psychiatric care, could fit well into society, are instead locked away, to become wards of the state’s penal system. Then, in a tragically ironic twist, they may be confined in conditions that nurture, rather than abate, their psychoses.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 319 F. Supp. 2d 162 - Kane v. Winn