In Hampton v. State of California, published October 3, 2023, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court's denial of a motion to dismiss a 42 U.S.C. section 1983 lawsuit brought by the wife of an inmate who died of COVID-19 in San Quentin prison. The case arises out of the same circumstances as Polanco v. Diaz (9th Cir. 2023) 76 F.4th 918: The state officials allegedly ordered prisoners in the California Institution for Men, which was suffering a severe COVID-19 outbreak early in the Pandemic, transferred to San Quentin, which was COVID-free. The officials allegedly took insufficient measures to test the transferred inmates or to isolate them from the San Quentin population. San Quentin went from being COVID free at the end of May 2020 to having 2,000 inmates (2/3 of the population) infected in August 2020. By September 2020, 26 inmates and one correctional officer had died of the disease. The decedent was a 62-year-old inmate who died in September 2020 of COVID. His wife asserted an 8th Amendment claim under section 1983, state statutory claims, and a state law negligence claim. The defendants asserted all of the claims were barred by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act ("PREP Act"), 42 U.S.C. § 247d-6d, immunity; that the 8th Amendment claim was barred by qualified immunity; and that the state law claims were barred by various Government Claims Act discretionary-act immunities and immunities in the California Emergency Services Act.
The 9th Circuit affirmed the district court's decision that the complaint was not subject to dismissal. The PREP Act's immunity for decisions regarding taking countermeasures to a declared state of emergency, because the allegations of the complaint were based on failure to apply covered countermeasures. Qualified immunity did not apply at the pleading stage, because the Polanco decision established that the alleged failure to adequately take precautions during the transfer was deliberate indifference, and because it was clearly established in 2020 that inmates had a right to be free from exposure to a serious disease. As for the state law immunities, the court reconsidered earlier decisions holding that a circuit court had jurisdiction to consider such immunities via interlocutory appeal. The California Supreme Court's decision in Quigley v. Garden Valley Fire Protection District (2019) 7 Cal. 5th 798 established that Government Code immunities were not jurisdictional, and were immunities from liability rather than immunities from suit. T
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