Arthur Gaspard v. S. Hatton

MEMORANDUM

California state prisoner Arthur Gas-pard appeals pro se from the district court’s summary judgment in his 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action alleging that defendants violated his Eighth Amendment rights by failing to protect him from an inmate assault. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 . We review de novo, Toguchi v. Chung, 391 F.3d 1051, 1056 (9th Cir.2004), and we affirm.

The district court properly granted summary judgment because Gaspard failed to raise a genuine dispute of material fact as to whether defendants knew of and disregarded a substantial risk of serious harm to Gaspard when they determined that he was eligible for a cellmate. See Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 837 , 114 S.Ct. 1970 , 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994) (holding that “a prison official cannot be found liable under the Eighth Amendment ... unless the official knows of and disregards an excessive risk to inmate ... safety”); see also. Estate of Ford v. Ramirez-Palmer, 301 F.3d 1043, 1051 (9th Cir.2002) (while prison officials’ decisions to double-cell the inmates “turned out [to] be quite unfortunate judgments,” it could not be said that a reasonable officer would have clearly understood the “risk of…