Document Type
Brief
Publication Date
12-4-2025
Publisher
United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
Language
en-US
Abstract
For ten days in the middle of winter, officers at the Kentucky State Penitentiary (KSP) confined Jacob Julick in freezing cells, dressed only in paper boxers, and without access to hygiene products, a shower, cleaning products, bedding, or shoes. The reason? Mistaken retribution in response to a recent assault on an officer in which Julick was not involved.
When Julick reported experiencing suicidal thoughts, Defendant Officer Jason Denny mocked him, telling him to “kill [him]self and do them the favor.” Shortly after, Julick was moved from his first solitary cell to a strip cage where he was handcuffed, shackled, and placed in a kneeling stress position, still wearing nothing but paper boxers. With no legitimate justification, Defendant Officer Dylan Bond pepper-sprayed Julick’s back and neck three times and prepared to tase Julick while standing safely on the other side of the strip cage’s locked grate. Officer Devin Neilson mocked the practically naked, freezing Julick by opening the door to the outside and asking if he wanted “fresh air.”
After this force incident, the conditions of Julick’s new cell were worse than those that initially triggered Julick’s suicidal thoughts. Officers moved Julick from the strip cage to this new, worse solitary cell caked in feces and dirt. He was forced to lie face down, with only paper boxers, barefoot and shivering, on the feces-caked floor during the next eight daily searches. Defendant Unit Administrator Sasha Primozich Villasenor later told Julick he was being “treated like this under the Warden Scott Jordan’s firm orders.”
The district court concluded that Bond’s use of pepper spray against a restrained, confined, incarcerated person was not “the sort of force repugnant to the conscience of mankind.” The court further deemed Julick’s “exceedingly unpleasant” conditions of confinement constitutionally insignificant. Yet the record reflects the sustained denial of basic human needs—warmth, hygiene, and freedom from abusive force. Under the Eighth Amendment, no safety or penological rationale can justify holding anyone for ten consecutive days in the cold, stripped nearly naked, and also forcing anyone for eight consecutive days to live among human waste. And, in any case, a reasonable jury could conclude that Defendants treated Julick in this manner with malicious intentions. These conditions, coupled with the gratuitous use of chemical weapons and ridicule, amount to precisely the wanton infliction of pain and denial of the modern standards of human decency that the Eighth Amendment forbids.
This Court should, therefore, reverse the district court’s grant of summary judgment to Defendants and remand for trial.
Recommended Citation
Aryssa Harris, Cameron Tong & Madeline H. Meth,
Opening Brief for Plaintiff-Appellant Jacob Julick
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4156
