Petitioner Antonio Smith suffered extraordinary, deliberate, and unconstitutional mistreatment at the hands of several Wisconsin prison officials in November 2017. After being pepper-sprayed for non-violent resistance to an unwanted medical examination, he was placed naked in a freezing control cell for 23 hours, in defiance of well-established prison procedures. His direct requests for clothing and bedding were denied, and one officer went so far as to condition the provision of these necessities on Mr. Smith abandoning his ongoing hunger strike protesting prison conditions.
In 2025, the Seventh Circuit unanimously agreed that Mr. Smith’s claims made out a viable Eighth Amendment violation, and his case closely parallels the set of “particularly egregious facts” that, according to the Supreme Court’s most recent word on the subject, “any reasonable officer should have realized offended the Constitution.”
Nevertheless, a majority of the lower court held that qualified immunity prevents Mr. Smith from presenting his constitutional claims to a jury because they were not “clearly established.”
Cato, joined by the American Association for Justice, Public Justice, and Due Process Institute, filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to grant review of the case and vacate the decision. Sufficiently obvious constitutional violations do not require plaintiffs to identify prior cases with functionally identical facts to overcome qualified immunity. Moreover, this case illustrates pointedly how the current qualified immunity regime both denies juries their fundamental role in ensuring public accountability and exacerbates an ongoing crisis of confidence in public institutions, especially law enforcement.
Rights are only as strong as the remedies that secure them. The Seventh Circuit acknowledged that Mr. Smith’s rights were violated but nevertheless held that the law afforded him no relief. A system that openly acknowledges a violation yet denies a remedy for want of identical precedent is one of caprice rather than principle.
