WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court appears likely Monday to bar federal prison inmates from suing officials who deny them medical treatment in the latest case aimed at curtailing the ability to hold federal officials accountable for alleged constitutional violations.
The court heard oral arguments on a complaint filed by a former federal prison inmate, Kekai Watanabe, who alleges that officers at a Honolulu-based facility denied him medical treatment in July 2021 after he was beaten by other prisoners during a gang riot.
The case focuses on the scope of a 1971 Supreme Court decision called Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, which for the first time allowed people to sue federal officials, including prison officials, for civil rights violations.
The Trump administration’s recent immigration crackdown has once again highlighted the lack of means to hold officers accused of violating the Constitution accountable.
In Monday’s arguments, the court appeared likely to continue its recent string of cases that have chipped away at the so-called Bivens allegations.
Although the court cannot overturn the Bivens decision itself, it seems likely that it will overturn a 1980 Supreme Court decision that developed it, called Carlson v. Green. Then the justices said federal prison inmates could sue officials for willful indifference to their medical needs under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment.
This ruling applies only to inmates in federal prisons, not those in state prisons who have other avenues to bring such claims.
In Monday’s argument, several justices in the 6-3 conservative majority noted that inmates have other ways to seek relief, including through internal prison proceedings and through a federal law called the Federal Tort Claims Act. Under the FTCA, plaintiffs sue the federal government rather than individual officials, and the amount of damages they can recover is limited.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito questioned whether Bivens’ claims add “anything of value” because most plaintiffs also file FTCA claims.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted that one of the “major themes” of the case was that the FTCA provided necessary recourse for inmates like Watanabe.
“If true, it seems to negate the necessity” of Bivens’ claims in the prison context, he added.
The court’s most recent decision overturning Bivens’ claims was a 6-3 decision in 2022 that Border Patrol agents could not be sued. An NBC News investigation in 2023 found that the decision had a major impact on pending cases nationwide, playing a role in the dismissal of 195 cases.
The Bivens decision is on such weak grounds that lawyers for the prison employee in Watanabe’s case, nurse Francis Nielsen, asked the justices to overturn it altogether. The Trump administration filed a brief supporting the defendant, but did not seek reversal of the Bivens decision.
Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, who were in the majority in the 2022 ruling on Border Patrol agents, seemed reluctant to overturn Bivens himself in Watanabe’s case.
Roberts seemed inclined to give weight to the Justice Department’s arguments, saying it was a “cautious and incremental approach to such a fundamental issue.”
Kavanaugh said a dispute over an inmate’s medical treatment would be a “strange case” to use as a vehicle to unseat Bivens; the initial case involved federal agents involved in a search of a man’s apartment.
In the incident at the center of Monday’s case, Watanabe said he asked Nielsen for treatment after he complained of pain following the riot, but his request was denied.
Watanabe, who is no longer in federal prison, was later diagnosed with a fractured tailbone and bone chips embedded in surrounding soft tissue. He then filed a lawsuit, claiming his Eighth Amendment rights had been violated.
A federal court threw out Watanabe’s lawsuit, but the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived it in a September 2024 decision.
The original Bivens case arose because Congress never specifically passed legislation allowing federal officials to face the same type of civil rights claims that local and state officials routinely face. Although a bill has been proposed in Congress, it has not yet gained momentum.
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