COURTNEY MCFIELDS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. THOMAS J. DART, Sheriff of Cook County, and COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, Defendants-Appellees.
No. 20-1391
United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit
Argued October 27, 2020 — Decided December 8, 2020
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 17 C 7424 — John Robert Blakey, Judge.
Before SYKES, Chief Judge, and KANNE and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.
I. BACKGROUND
Defendants Cook County and its sheriff operate Cook County Jail and are charged with providing medical and dental care to pretrial detainees housed there. The district court construed the word “detainees” in the complaint to mean “pretrial detainees” because the Cook County Jail “houses primarily people who have not yet been convicted.” The difference matters because the standard of proof is different for medical claims asserted by pretrial detainees and those brought by persons already convicted.
Under the jail‘s so-called “paper triage” policy, a detainee who has dental pain and wants treatment must submit a health service request form (“HSRF“), various versions of which existed between 2011 and 2018. Once submitted, staff review the HSRF and categorize it as “routine,” “priority,” or “urgent,” and the detainee is then referred to a dentist for treatment in anywhere from three to thirty days (depending on the categorization).
Importantly, however, most detainees do not receive a face-to-face assessment from a nurse or higher-level practitioner before they ultimately receive care from a dentist. A face-to-face assessment would include an oral health screening, which could identify bona fide complaints of dental pain or reveal serious medical issues and would allow
Courtney McFields complains about that last aspect of this policy — the failure to provide all detainees who complain of dental pain with face-to-face assessments. McFields was held in the Cook County Jail from September 10 to December 18, 2014. He began experiencing dental pain while in custody, and on October 28, he submitted an HSRF complaining of a hole in his tooth and indicating a pain level of 7/10. A nurse reviewed the HSRF the next day, classified it as “routine,” and referred it to dental staff without conducting a face-to-face assessment. McFields submitted at least one additional HSRF in mid-November, complaining of a pain level of 9/10. On November 20, McFields saw a dentist, who extracted the responsible tooth.
On October 13, 2017, McFields and other plaintiffs filed a putative class action against Defendants alleging that they suffered gratuitous pain as a result of the jail‘s paper triage policy. They alleged that the standard of care for processing a health service request requires a face-to-face assessment within 48 hours and that the jail‘s policy deviating from this standard is objectively unreasonable in violation of the
In April 2018, the district court denied Defendants’ motion to dismiss the case as untimely. The district court held that the previous class action Smentek v. Sheriff of Cook County, No. 09-cv-529 (N.D. Ill.), tolled the two-year statute of limitations for the plaintiffs’ claims. McFields v. Sheriff of Cook Cnty., No. 17-CV-7424, 2018 WL 1784138, at *3 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 13, 2018).
Then, in November 2018, McFields and the other plaintiffs moved under
The district court denied the motion for class certification after concluding that the plaintiffs failed to satisfy the commonality, typicality, and predominance requirements of
Afterwards, the other plaintiffs accepted unconditional offers of judgment and did not reserve the right to appeal. McFields also accepted an offer of judgment but did reserve his right to appeal. He then filed the appeal we now address.
II. ANALYSIS
We review the district court‘s denial of class certification for abuse of discretion. Messner v. Northshore Univ. HealthSystem, 669 F.3d 802, 811 (7th Cir. 2012) (citing Arreola v. Godinez, 546 F.3d 788, 794 (7th Cir. 2008)). But if “the district court bases its discretionary decision on an erroneous view of the law or a clearly erroneous assessment of the evidence, then it has necessarily abused its discretion.” Id. (citing Cooter & Gell v. Hartmarx Corp., 496 U.S. 384, 405 (1990); Ervin v. OS Restaurant Servs., Inc., 632 F.3d 971, 976 (7th Cir. 2011)).
“To be certified as a class action, the putative class must first meet the four requirements of
We focus on
A. Commonality
McFields argues that the questions common to the proposed class include (1) whether there was a widespread practice of failing to provide face-to-face assessments and, if so, (2) whether that policy exposed detainees to a substantial risk of harm in violation of the Constitution. Before deciding whether these proffered common questions are sufficient to satisfy
That argument is without merit. Determining whether common questions are likely to generate common answers apt to drive the resolution of the litigation “requires a precise understanding of the nature
McFields contends that Driver v. Marion County Sheriff, 859 F.3d 489 (2017), shows the impropriety of looking to the merits at the class certification stage. But there, we reiterated the above principle: “[t]o certify a class, the trial court must satisfy itself ‘after a rigorous analysis’ that the
So it was appropriate for the district court to analyze commonality in light of the nature of McFields‘s claim. And our analysis does the same.
McFields‘s denial-of-care claim is governed by two main cases. The first is Monell v. New York City Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978), which requires a plaintiff to show that he “(1) suffered a deprivation of a federal right; (2) as a result of either an express municipal policy, widespread custom, or deliberate act of a decision-maker with final policymaking authority ...; which (3) was the proximate cause of his injury.” King v. Kramer, 763 F.3d 635, 649 (7th Cir. 2014) (alterations omitted) (quoting Ienco v. City of Chicago, 286 F.3d 994, 998 (7th Cir. 2002)). The second is Miranda v. County of Lake, 900 F.3d 335 (7th Cir. 2018), in which we held that a pretrial detainee bringing a claim for denial of medical care must show that the challenged policy is “objectively unreasonable.” Id. at 351 (citing Kingsley v. Hendrickson, 576 U.S. 389, 392 (2015)). “This standard requires courts to focus on the totality of facts and circumstances faced by the individual alleged to have provided inadequate medical care and to gauge objectively ... whether the response was reasonable.” McCann v. Ogle Cnty., 909 F.3d 881, 886 (7th Cir. 2018).
With these cases in mind, we can quickly discard McFields‘s second proposed common question — whether the paper triage policy violates the Constitution. Answering this question in the affirmative requires McFields to prove that the policy was objectively unreasonable, Miranda, 900 F.3d at 351, but that is, by its nature, an inquiry not suitable for resolution as to all class members in one fell swoop, McCann, 909 F.3d at 886. Rather, it is an individualized inquiry that depends in large part on what is disclosed on each detainee‘s HSRF — when it was submitted, what type of grievance and what level of pain it reveals, and so forth. So the second common question proposed by McFields is not a “common” question at all.
That leaves only McFields‘s first proposed common question — whether there even exists a policy that does not give face-to-face assessments to all detainees who
We still must determine not only if that policy was objectively unreasonable as to each individual class member based on his or her specific circumstances, but also whether each detainee suffered a constitutional injury and whether each of those injuries was proximately caused by the unreasonable policy. See King, 763 F.3d at 649 (“[O]bviously, the question of whether there existed a policy or custom is distinct from the question of whether the plaintiff presents a cognizable constitutional injury.“).
It matters immensely that each detainee “present[s] a different situation that involved a different type of dental pain, took place at a different time, [and] involved different medical professionals and prison staff,” Phillips, 828 F.3d at 555; it is precisely these sorts of “[d]issimilarities within the proposed class” that “have the potential to impede the generation of common answers” apt to drive resolution of the litigation, Bell v. PNC Bank, Nat‘l Ass‘n, 800 F.3d 360, 374 (7th Cir. 2015) (quoting Wal-Mart, 564 U.S. at 350).
Some examples illustrate the point. Suppose a detainee submits an HSRF complaining of a toothache in the morning and is treated by a world-class dentist that afternoon. Or imagine that, for some reason, a perfectly healthy detainee falsely indicates extreme pain on his HSRF. Both would fall comfortably into McFields‘s proposed class so long as neither was given a face-to-face assessment before receiving dental treatment, but obviously, these would-be plaintiffs have suffered no injury and have no colorable constitutional claim. Thus, determining only that the policy exists leaves us miles from resolving the litigation on a classwide basis. Or, as the district court put it, a failure to provide a face-to-face assessment “says nothing about whether the ultimate course of treatment violated the Constitution.”
In short, “[t]he claims of every class member will [not] rise or fall on the resolution of” whether the paper triage policy existed, Suchanek, 764 F.3d at 757, and whether the policy was objectively unreasonable requires an individualized, plaintiff-specific assessment, McCann, 909 F.3d at 886. We therefore conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in finding that McFields fails to satisfy commonality.3
B. Typicality
We agree with the district court that McFields has not “af-firmatively demonstrate[d] his compliance with the” typicality requirement. Wal-Mart, 564 U.S. at 350. Though a separate inquiry from the commonality question, our conclusion here flows from the same basic defects described above. See Priddy v. Health Care Servs. Corp., 870 F.3d 657, 660 (7th Cir. 2017) (“Commonality and typicality ‘tend to merge.‘” (quoting Gen. Tel. Co. of S.W. v. Falcon, 457 U.S. 147, 157 n.13 (1982))). Each class member — McFields included — presents fundamentally unique circumstances. And these differing situations are not the mere “factual distinctions” that arise in most any case; these are overwhelming factual distinctions that defeat any “essential characteristics” across the claims. Muro, 580 F.3d at 492 (quoting De La Fuente, 713 F.2d at 232).
McFields asserts that his claim is based on the same “course of conduct” that affected all members of the class. But that does not mean that his claim has “the same essential characteristics as the claims of the class at large,” which is what “the requirement is meant to ensure.” Id. (quoting Retired Chi. Police Ass‘n v. City of Chicago, 7 F.3d 584, 597 (7th Cir. 1993)). In fact, the district court found that “it was not the failure to provide the [face-to-face] assessment that allegedly delayed McFields’ treatment,” but “the delay in the execution of the [nurse‘s] referral” of his HSRF to a dentist. “Had the nurse‘s referral ... been acted upon with expediency, McFields could hardly be heard to complain about the lack of a face-to-face assessment.” These facts set McFields‘s claim apart from those of the other putative class members. We therefore see no abuse of discretion in the district court‘s conclusion that evaluating the plaintiffs’ claims “requires a ‘highly individualized inquiry‘; each Plaintiff‘s case is different and, therefore, no case is typical.” See Wrightsell v. Sheriff of Cook Cnty., No. 08 CV 5451, 2009 WL 482370, at *2 (N.D. Ill. Feb. 19, 2009).
C. Predominance
Finally,
The district court concluded that McFields failed to satisfy the predominance requirement because “individual issues — the facts and circumstances of each individual detainee‘s claim — predominate.” We see no real need to analyze this issue given our conclusions that McFields failed to satisfy the requirements of
At any rate, predominance is doomed here. Satisfying predominance “requires more than a tally of common questions; the district court must consider their relative importance.” Beaton v. SpeedyPC Software, 907 F.3d 1018, 1029 (7th Cir. 2018) (citing Parko v. Shell Oil Co., 739 F.3d 1083, 1085 (7th Cir. 2014)); see Amchem Prods., 521 U.S. at 624 (finding predominance not satisfied “[g]iven the greater number of questions peculiar to the [individual] class members ... and the significance of those uncommon questions“). Considering our analysis above, we agree with the district court‘s finding that individual issues predominate over common questions — the opposite of what
We have no need to address Defendants’ alternative argument that McFields is an inadequate class representative because his claim is untimely.
III. CONCLUSION
For the above reasons, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying class certification. We therefore AFFIRM the district court.