Ammons

Opinion by Judge B. FLETCHER; Partial Concurrence and Partial Dissent by Judge BYBEE.

OPINION

Appellants Mary LaFond (“LaFond”) and Norman Webster (“Webster”) (collec *1023 tively “Appellants”), relying on qualified immunity, appeal the district court’s order denying their motion for summary judgment. Appellee Crystal Ammons (“Ammons”) sued LaFond and Webster under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violating her Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process right to safe conditions while in the custody of a state-run mental institution. The district court denied Appellants’ motion for summary judgment, rejecting both LaFond’s and Webster’s claims of qualified immunity. It concluded that the record, when read in the light most favorable to Ammons, supported the claim that Appellants failed to exercise professional judgment with respect to Ammons’s safety. Appellants timely appealed. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 , and we affirm in part and reverse in part.

I.

The events in this case took place at the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services’s (“DSHS”) Child Study and Treatment Center (“CSTC”). The CSTC is a residential psychiatric hospital for severely…

concurring in part and dissenting in part:

In Youngberg v. Borneo, the Supreme Court held that those involuntarily committed in state-run mental hospitals have “rights ... to reasonable conditions of safety.” 457 U.S. 307, 321 , 102 S.Ct. 2452 , 73 L.Ed.2d 28 (1982). Recognizing that “an institution cannot protect its residents from all danger of violence,” the Court found that “the Constitution only requires that the courts make certain that professional judgment in fact was exercised.” Id. at 320-21 , 102 S.Ct. 2452 (citation and quotation marks omitted). Despite the Court’s instruction that “[i]t is not appropriate for the courts to specify which of several professionally acceptable choices should have been made,” id. at 321 , 102 S.Ct. 2452 , the majority embarks on precisely this quest, defining a new code of conduct for mental health hospital administrators and casting “professional personnel ... [into] the shadow of an action for damages,” id. at 325 , 102 S.Ct. 2452 .

Not only does the majority author a code of model professional conduct, it finds *1037 its code to be both constitutionally compelled and clearly established. Indeed, under the majority’s code:

These new…

David P. Moody, Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, Seattle, WA, for the plaintiff-appellee.

Ian M. Bauer, and Patricia Campbell Fetterly, Office of the Attorney General, of Washington, Olympia, WA, for the defendants-appellants.

Before: BETTY B. FLETCHER and JAY S. BYBEE, Circuit Judges, and CLAUDIA WILKEN, District Judge. [*]

Opinion by Judge B. FLETCHER; Partial Concurrence and Partial Dissent by Judge BYBEE.

B. FLETCHER, Circuit Judge:

Appellants Mary LaFond ("LaFond") and Norman Webster ("Webster") (collectively "Appellants"), relying on qualified immunity, appeal the district court's order denying their motion for summary judgment. Appellee Crystal Ammons ("Ammons") sued LaFond and Webster under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violating her Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process right to safe conditions while in the custody of a state-run mental institution. The district court denied Appellants' motion for summary judgment, rejecting both LaFond's and Webster's claims of qualified immunity. It concluded that the record, when read in the light most favorable to Ammons, supported the claim that Appellants failed to exercise professional judgment with respect to Ammons's safety.…