Freeman v. Berge’s Empirical Analysis
441 F.3d 543 · 2006
Citation profile
8 federal appellate · 1 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 25 later decisions — most recently March 2022 · most notably Aamer v. Obama (2014), Estate of Rice ex rel. Rice v. Correctional Medical Services (2012)
8 federal appellate · 1 district · 3 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Farmer v. Brennan · Washington v. Glucksberg · Cruzan Ex Rel. Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health · Carolyn Comstock v. Norris McCrary v. S. Thyagarajan and David Howell · Martha Sanville v. Gary McCaughtry
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 25 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Free people who are sane have a liberty interest in refusing life-saving medical treatment, Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept. of Health, 497 U.S. 261, 278-79 , 110 S. Ct. 2841 , 111 L.Ed.2d 224 (1990), and likewise in refusing to eat.... But either prisoners don't have such an interest, or it is easily overridden. The reasons are practical.... If prisoners were allowed to kill themselves, prisons would find it even more difficult than they do to maintain discipline, because of the effect of a suicide in agitating the other prisoners. Prison officials who let prisoners starve themselves to death would also expose themselves to lawsuits by the prisoners' estates. Reckless indifference to the risk of a prisoner's committing suicide is a standard basis for a federal civil rights suit. The idea behind liability in such cases is that incarceration can place a person under unusual psychological strain and the jail or prison [is] under a commensurate duty to prevent the prisoner from giving way to the strain. The analysis is applicable when suicide takes the form of starving oneself to death. So at some point in [the inmate]'s meal-skipping the prison doctors would have had a duty and certainly a right to step in and force him to take nourishment.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[T]here is a difference between using food deprivation as a punishment and establishing a reasonable condition to the receipt of food.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Gillis v. Litscher
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.