Hudson v. McMillian

The majority declared that, in a case of excessive force, if the officials "maliciously and sadistically use force to cause harm, contemporary standards of decency always are violated." This was true even if significant injury was not evident. "Otherwise," the majority explained, "the Eighth Amendment would permit any physical punishment, no matter how diabolic or inhuman, inflicting less than some arbitrary quantity of injury. Such a result would have been as unacceptable to the drafters of the Eighth Amendment as it is today."

The majority reminded readers that the holding was not intended to prevent prison officials from using force to maintain order, nor was its purpose to protect overly sensitive prison inmates. "[E]very malevolent touch by a prison guard" does not constitute a federal case, the Court cautioned. Disagreeing with the Fifth Circuit Court's factual findings, the majority concluded that the "bruises, swelling, loosened teeth, and cracked dental plate" were not insignificant, and that they provided "no basis" for the dismissal of his claim. O'Connor rebutted the arguments of the dissenting Justices, Scalia and Thomas, noting differences in interpretation of precedent, and she dismissed the respondents' argument that their acts were "isolated and unauthorized" and therefore could not constitute an Eighth Amendment violation. The majority refused to consider the argument because it was not presented in the question to the Court, because a supervisor had authorized the alleged beating, and because the record in the case indicated that the alleged actions of the accused officials were not, in fact, isolated.

Justices Stevens and Blackmun wrote concurring opinions. Stevens disagreed with the majority over its use of the "malicious and sadistic" standard. Such a high standard of proof for an inmate is appropriate, Stevens maintained, when the force under question was used to protect visitors, guards, other prisoners, and other people. Because no such threat existed in Hudson's case as Hudson was in shackles, Stevens felt that the majority should have used the lesser standard and examined whether the guards inflicted unnecessary and wanton pain.

Blackmun wrote an entirely different concurring opinion. In it, Stevens described the real-life torture of prisoners that would go unpunished if significant physical injury was required for Eighth Amendment excessive force claims: "lashing prisoners with leather straps, whipping them with rubber hoses, beating them with naked fists, shocking them with electric currents, asphyxiating them short of death, intentionally exposing them to undue heat or cold, or forcibly injecting them with psychosis-inducing drugs." Citing various cases, Blackmun noted that "[t]hese techniques, commonly thought to be practiced only outside this Nation's borders, are hardly unknown within this Nation's prisons." Blackmun agreed with the majority that significant physical injury was not required in Hudson's case, but he went even further and suggested that psychological injury should not be foreclosed in other Eighth Amendment cases. As support for this proposition, Blackmun cited the case of Wisniewski v. Kennard (1990) in which a prison guard was accused of placing a gun in a prisoner's mouth and threatening to kill him.