Ramos v. Patnaude’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

4 federal appellate · 13 district · 1 state decisions

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. “The issues, too, are subject to reduction, beginning with one alternative ground for judgment, the failure to exhaust administrative remedies, which is the subject of a substantial portion of the briefing before us. So far as it concerns the federal claim, satisfaction of the exhaustion requirement of § 1997e(a) turns on whether prisoners at the House of Correction were on notice that complaints about denial of access to medical care were subject to the administrative grievance procedure (as distinct from complaints about the merit of medical care actually rendered, which clearly are not), and on whether Ramos’s claims here are about denial of access rather than the quality of treatment. Ramos argues, with color of support, that no such grievance opportunity was made known, and thus aims at reversing both the adverse ruling on exhaustion, and (if he succeeds on that) at vacating the equally adverse rulings on the merits, which he says were beyond the district court’s jurisdiction once it held Ramos had failed to exhaust. The appellees counter that failure to exhaust was the correct conclusion, but that the merits ruling was independently within the trial court’s power, since exhaustion is not a jurisdictional requirement. We take a third position, for economy of disposition, in choosing to bypass the exhaustion issue just because it is not jurisdictional, and because the merits decision is sound, as we will explain. The Supreme Court made it plain in Woodford v. Ngo, 548. U.S”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 93 F. Supp. 3d 1106 - Benjamin v. Ward County

2. “There is no question that Dr. Patnaude owed a duty to [the plaintiff] when acting on behalf of the House of Corrections under his contract to serve as its medical director. But the district court understood the record to show only arguable negligence with no reasonable possibility of a juiy finding that the doctor was deliberately indifferent, that is, that he actually understood that such a substantial risk existed and was actually indifferent to it in failing to take appropriate mitigating action. See Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 837 (1994) (§1983 liability attaches only when the “official knows of and disregards an excessive risk to inmate health or safety”); Sires v. Berman, 834 F.2d 9, 13 (1st Cir. 1987) (in cases alleging deliberate indifference to medical risk, “(t]he care provided must have been so inadequate as to shock the conscience” (quoting Torraco v. Maloney, 923 F.2d 231, 231 (1st Cir. 1991)).”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 29 Mass. L. Rptr. 264 - Nelson v. Patnaude

3. “so inadequate as to shock the conscience,”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Contino v. Hillsborough DOC