What happened
The Fourth Circuit on Thursday vacated former Bureau of Prisons official Shronda Covington's civil rights conviction in a case arising from an incarcerated person's fatal medical crisis, holding that the jury should have been told the government had to prove proximate cause before finding that her conduct resulted in bodily injury.
The published decision affirmed the false-statement convictions of Covington and former BOP nurse Tonya Farley, but vacated Covington's conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 242, vacated both defendants' sentences and remanded. Judge Toby Heytens wrote for the majority, joined by Judge James Wynn, with Judge Allison Jones Rushing concurring in part and dissenting in part.
The case stems from the death of an incarcerated person identified in the opinion as W.W. The panel said Covington was the highest-ranking official on duty when W.W.'s medical crisis began and was, for four and a half hours, the only on-site official with authority to call a physician or send an inmate to a hospital. The government presented evidence that officers told Covington W.W. was falling, hitting his head, unable to respond, incontinent and eating from a trash can, while Covington denied being told of his symptoms.
Farley later examined W.W., saw alarming symptoms and believed he might have a head injury, but called the prison's on-call psychologist rather than the on-call physician or sending W.W. to a hospital under BOP policy, according to the opinion. W.W. was moved to a suicide-watch cell, repeatedly fell over the next several hours and was later found dead; a medical examiner concluded he sustained multiple skull fractures and died from blunt force trauma to the head.
The majority said the evidence was sufficient to support the convictions and rejected the defendants' other challenges to their false-statement counts. But it held that Section 242's enhanced-penalty language for bodily injury or death that “results from” a civil rights violation requires both but-for and proximate causation, and that the district court erred by instructing the jury only on but-for causation.
That error required vacating Covington's Section 242 conviction rather than entering an acquittal, the panel said, because the record contained sufficient evidence to support the verdict under the correct legal standard. The court also vacated Covington's sentence on both counts and sent the matter back for further proceedings.
The panel separately vacated Farley's sentence, faulting the district court's use of her January 2021 conduct to calculate the advisory Guidelines range for her later false-statement conviction. The opinion said the court either failed to decide whether that conduct qualified as relevant conduct under the Guidelines or applied the wrong legal standard; the disputed enhancements had raised Farley's advisory range from zero to six months to 10 to 16 months.
Judge Rushing agreed that the district court should have given a proximate-cause instruction, but dissented from vacating Covington's Section 242 conviction. In her view, the instructional error was harmless because the jury's deliberate-indifference finding necessarily showed that bodily injury was a natural and foreseeable result of Covington's conduct.