McGuire v. Johnson, et al.
9th Cir. No. 25-1457
Rights Behind Bars, together with our partners at Hogan Lovells US LLP, represents Robert McGuire, a man incarcerated at High Desert State Prison in Nevada who was denied meaningful opportunities to exercise for nearly two years. After Mr. McGuire was transferred to the prison in August 2020 and housed in an administrative segregation unit, officials barred him from the outdoor yard and from the individual recreation cages built for use during lockdowns—leaving him, for more than two months, with no way to exercise at all, since extreme heat and broken air conditioning made working out in his cell impossible. For the twenty months that followed, he was scheduled for only one to two hours of recreation a week, far below the seven hours Nevada regulations required, and by his account often went weeks with no outdoor time, confined to his cell roughly twenty-three hours a day. Mr. McGuire reported the deprivation and filed grievances asking simply to be let outside; the prison left them pending for months and, when it answered, offered only that his unit had been locked down for unspecified "emergency situations."
Acting pro se, Mr. McGuire brought an Eighth Amendment claim against the prison's acting warden, Calvin Johnson. The district court denied Warden Johnson qualified immunity, holding that a jury could find both that the deprivation was serious enough to violate the Constitution and that the warden—who reviewed and denied Mr. McGuire's grievance—was deliberately indifferent to the risk. Warden Johnson filed an interlocutory appeal, and Rights Behind Bars represented Mr. McGuire in defending the denial. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, holding that most of the warden's arguments merely disputed the facts—which are not reviewable on an interlocutory appeal from the denial of qualified immunity—and that a prisoner's right to outdoor exercise or otherwise meaningful recreation was clearly established well before 2020. The Court also confirmed that long-term deprivations of exercise are serious regardless of their physical effects. The case returns to the district court, where Mr. McGuire's Eighth Amendment claim will proceed toward trial.