CINCINNATI (LN) — The Sixth Circuit on Thursday affirmed summary judgment for Ontonagon County, Michigan and four of its corrections officers in a civil rights lawsuit over the 2021 jail suicide of Paul Bliven, ruling that his consistent denials of suicidal feelings during intake shielded the officers from liability under the demanding strong-likelihood standard that governed pretrial-detainee claims.
Bliven, arrested in May 2021 after allegedly shooting at a neighbor's home with an air rifle while claiming the neighbor's gang was using microwave frequencies to fry him, was booked into the Ontonagon County Jail and placed in a cell equipped with a bunk bed, bench, table, and electric fan. Four days later, he used the fan's cord to fashion a noose, tied it to a window frame, and stepped off the bench. Officers cut him down and began CPR, but paramedics pronounced him dead.
His daughter, Connie Overstreet, sued the county, its sheriff, and four officers, arguing they were deliberately indifferent to the risk Bliven would kill himself and that county policies facilitated his death.
Writing for a unanimous panel, Circuit Judge Murphy held that Bliven's own statements at intake — that he had no current suicidal feelings, had never attempted suicide, and had no plans to harm himself — constituted strong circumstantial evidence that the officers lacked the required knowledge of a suicide risk. The court applied the pre-Brawner subjective deliberate-indifference standard because Bliven died in May 2021, four months before the Sixth Circuit adopted a more lenient test for pretrial detainees in Brawner v. Scott County.
The panel addressed each officer individually. Booking officer Girard Waldrop, who noted that Bliven seemed possibly intoxicated, had recently received mental-health treatment, and was screaming a lot, nonetheless testified that he was shocked when he learned that Bliven committed suicide because Bliven did not give the officers any cause to think that he would harm himself. The court held that Bliven's disclosure of prior hospital treatment and his delusional comments about microwave radiation amounted to generic risk factors that the circuit has consistently held insufficient without specific evidence of an immediate suicide risk.
For Officer Doug Roberts, who left his desk monitoring security cameras to help repair a jammed cell door — approximately 35 minutes before Bliven was found hanging — the panel held that the absence of any policy requiring continuous camera monitoring made his departure irrelevant, and that the more fundamental problem was that Roberts had no knowledge of a suicide risk place. A cell check Roberts completed less than 50 minutes before Bliven's death showed nothing unusual.
Overstreet's Monell claim against the county fared no better. The panel rejected her three theories in turn: that the county's monitoring policy was constitutionally deficient, that officers violated their own policy by not placing Bliven cell, and that the county ratified unconstitutional conduct through inadequate post-incident investigation. On the last theory, the court noted that any ratification occurring after Bliven's death could not have caused it, and Overstreet had identified no prior incidents that would establish a pattern of investigative failures.
The panel also declined to credit Overstreet's expert, who opined that the officers' practices fell below the standard of care and that they should have done things differently. That showing, the court said, amounts to a should-have-perceived standard that does not satisfy the requirement that officers actually perceived the risk.
The opinion was recommended for publication, giving it precedential weight in the circuit's ongoing effort to define when generic mental-health red flags — as opposed to suicide-specific warning signs such as a prior attempt or a clinical determination of suicidality — can sustain a deliberate-indifference claim. The court noted that its cases have uniformly recognized that the subjective element sets a high bar in suicide cases, and that an inmate's consistent denial of suicidal feelings represents strong evidence cutting against officer liability.
Chief Judge Sutton and Circuit Judge Clay joined the opinion.