Jason Tillery, a prisoner at Whiteville Correctional Facility, was assaulted by a fellow inmate wielding a fan motor on March 6, 2022, while his unit was left unguarded. Physicians at Elvis Presley Trauma Center in Memphis found multiple facial fractures, performed surgery, and directed Tillery to visit an eye clinic within two weeks of discharge. Back at Whiteville, where he was placed in disciplinary segregation rather than the medical unit, Dr. Elaina Rodela was assigned to his care. According to Tillery's complaint, Rodela never sent him for the follow-up despite his repeated complaints of headaches and blurred vision. Less than ten days after the first attack, WCF returned Tillery to general population, where he was threatened and extorted before being assaulted a second time — again with no guards present — aggravating his earlier injuries.
Tillery sued CoreCivic, Inc. and CoreCivic of Tennessee, LLC, Whiteville warden Vince Vantell, Rodela, and three corporate officers — CEO Damon Hininger, COO Patrick Swindle, and VP of facility operations Jason Medlin — under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging Eighth Amendment violations through failure to protect and deliberate indifference to medical needs. He also alleged that CoreCivic systematically understaffed its facilities to maximize profits, pointing to audits, media reports, and litigation involving CoreCivic facilities in Idaho, Oklahoma, Kansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee from 2011 to 2022.
Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, Jr. of the Middle District of Tennessee held that only the medical-indifference claim against Rodela in her individual capacity survives. On the failure-to-protect claims, the court held that Tillery's allegations — including the general understaffing evidence from other states and facilities — did not plausibly establish that he faced an objectively excessive risk of harm before either assault, as required under the Sixth Circuit's framework in Caraway v. CoreCivic of Tennessee, LLC and Zakora v. Chrisman. The court noted that the first assault did not itself demonstrate an ongoing elevated risk, because the complaint left open whether the attacks stemmed from personal animus, gang disputes, or random violence that could have occurred in a fully staffed unit.
On the medical-indifference claim, the court held that Rodela's situation was meaningfully different from the nurse in the Sixth Circuit's recent Lowrance v. CoreCivic, Inc. decision, where the connection between a missed dental visit and a fatal sepsis outcome was not obvious. Here, the hospital had specifically directed an eye clinic follow-up, Tillery continuously reported headaches and blurred vision, and the court held it would have been obvious that those symptoms would persist without the directed care. The complaint's allegations that Rodela ignored his complaints, failed to send him for the eye evaluation, failed to transfer him to a facility capable of treating his injuries, and ignored his grievances were sufficient to plausibly allege conscious disregard.
Because Rodela's alleged misconduct was the only surviving constitutional violation, the Monell claim against CoreCivic, the official-capacity claims against Vantell and Rodela, and the supervisory liability claims against Hininger, Swindle, and Medlin all failed for want of an underlying constitutional violation — a requirement the court grounded in Lowrance, Caraway, and Cook v. CoreCivic, Inc. The court also found no sufficient allegations connecting Rodela's individual treatment decisions to any CoreCivic-wide policy. The medical malpractice and negligence claims under state law survive only as to Rodela; the court declined supplemental jurisdiction over those claims against all other defendants.