Toby Meagher, through his Litigation Guardian JOSHUA BROTHERS v. RODNEY PRIOLEAU, Officer;

NOT FOR PUBLICATION
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
TOBY MEAGHER, through his Litigation
Guardian JOSHUA BROTHERS,
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
RODNEY PRIOLEAU, Officer; et al.,
Defendants-Appellants,
and
KING COUNTY; et al.,
Defendants.
No. 20-35635
D.C. No. 2:19-cv-00259-JLR
MEMORANDUM*
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Western District of Washington
James L. Robart, District Judge, Presiding
Argued and Submitted June 17, 2021
Anchorage, Alaska
Before: RAWLINSON, CHRISTEN, and R. NELSON, Circuit Judges.
FILED
AUG 27 2021
MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK
U.S. COURT OF APPEALS
* This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent
except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3.

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Plaintiff Toby Meagher was brutally attacked by his cellmate Troy Leae at
the King County Jail (KCJ) and sued KCJ and several jail employees, pursuant to
42 U.S.C. § 1983, arguing they should have protected Meagher from Leae—who
had a long history of unprovoked attacks on staff and detainees. The district court
denied qualified immunity to three individual defendants: Joseph Garcia, Rodney
Prioleau, and Gregg Curtis. They filed this interlocutory appeal of only the district
court’s conclusion that Meagher’s rights were clearly established when Leae
attacked him. We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291,1 and we affirm
the district court’s ruling.2
We review the denial of qualified immunity de novo. See Kennedy v. City of
Ridgefield, 439 F.3d 1055, 1059 (9th Cir. 2006). We accept Meagher’s version of
the facts as true, and draw all reasonable inferences in his favor. See Plumhoff v.
Rickard, 572 U.S. 765, 768 (2014). “[Q]ualified immunity protects government
officials ‘from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate
clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person
1 Meagher argues we lack jurisdiction over this appeal because the district
court concluded there are triable issues of fact, and because the defendants fail to
state the facts in the light most favorable to him. We maintain jurisdiction to
review the “purely legal” question of whether his rights were clearly established.
Pauluk v. Savage, 836 F.3d 1117, 1121 (9th Cir. 2016).
2 The parties are familiar with the facts, and we recite them only as necessary
to resolve the issues on appeal.
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would have known.’” Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 231 (2009) (quoting
Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982)).
To determine whether to grant qualified immunity, courts consider two
elements, and the court may consider them in any order: “(1) whether there has
been a violation of a constitutional right; and (2) whether that right was clearly
established at the time of the officer’s alleged misconduct.” Lal v. California, 746
F.3d 1112, 1116 (9th Cir. 2014) (citation omitted). A right is clearly established if
its “contours” are “sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand
that what he is doing violates that right.” Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 202
(2001) (citation omitted). To constitute such notice, prior “precedent must be
‘“controlling”—from the Ninth Circuit or Supreme Court—or otherwise be
embraced by a “consensus” of courts outside the relevant jurisdiction.’” Martinez
v. City of Clovis, 943 F.3d 1260, 1275 (9th Cir. 2019) (quoting Sharp v. County of
Orange, 871 F.3d 901, 911 (9th Cir. 2017)).
The Eighth Amendment protects prisoners from the infliction of cruel and
unusual punishments. U.S. Const. amend. VIII. The Supreme Court has held that
the due process rights of a pretrial detainee, secured via the Fourteenth
Amendment, “are at least as great as the Eighth Amendment protections available
to a convicted prisoner.” City of Revere v. Mass. Gen. Hosp., 463 U.S. 239, 244
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(1983). In Farmer v. Brennan, the Supreme Court explained that “[h]aving
incarcerated ‘persons [with] demonstrated proclivit[ies] for antisocial criminal, and
often violent, conduct,’” “prison officials have a duty . . . to protect prisoners from
violence at the hands of other prisoners” because prison officials have “stripped
them of virtually every means of self-protection and foreclosed their access to
outside aid . . . .” 511 U.S. 825, 833 (1994) (emphasis added) (citations omitted).
We applied these principles in Castro v. County of Los Angeles, 833 F.3d 1060,
1067 (9th Cir. 2016) (en banc) (denying qualified immunity on similar facts),
decided nearly two years before Leae’s assault on Meagher.
Here, defendants argue that no clearly established authority states that a
detainee’s right to be free from violence at the hands of other detainees requires jail
personnel to evaluate unproven, anecdotal allegations of violence in his assailant’s
protected health information. The district court concluded this “narrow framing of
the right” was “unavailing,” given our decision in Castro. We agree. Clearly
established authority need not have “identical or even ‘materially similar’ facts”; it
need only have provided defendants fair warning that their conduct (as alleged by
Meagher) was unlawful. See Serrano v. Francis, 345 F.3d 1071, 1077 (9th Cir.
2003). We conclude Meagher’s rights were clearly established because, after
Farmer and Castro, “[n]one of the defendants can claim ignorance to a prisoner’s
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right to be protected from violence at the hands of other inmates.” Wilk v. Neven,
956 F.3d 1143, 1150 (9th Cir. 2020).
AFFIRMED.
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