Mark KOCH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. James G. RICKETTS, Defendant-Appellee

This § 1983 action is one of several filed by Arizona state prisoners against their keepers following body cavity searches undertaken in 1984 by prison guards in response to an informant’s statement that gunpowder and blasting caps may have been concealed in body cavities. All the cases except that of Mark Koch were disposed of in earlier litigation. See Vaughan v. Ricketts, 950 F.2d 1464 (9th Cir.1991) (Vaughan II). This is the fourth time parts of this case have been to this court. The first appeal affirmed the trial court’s order denying a defense motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity. See Vaughan v. Ricketts, 859 F.2d 736 (9th Cir.1988) cert. denied, 490 U.S. 1012 , 109 S.Ct. 1655 , 104 L.Ed.2d 169 (1989) (Vaughan I). We agreed that jury questions remained to be tried on Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment claims.

Vaughan III was an unpublished disposition rejecting the prison officials’ argument that Koch’s appeal was barred as untimely, and remanding the case to the trial court for consideration of the merits. At trial, the jury found for Koch on his claim that the search and post search acts and omissions violated his Eighth Amendment rights, but the…