The Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment prohibits the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain. Prison officials violate the Eighth Amendment when they act with deliberate indifference to a prisoner's serious medical needs by refusing to provide minimally adequate medical care. Eighth Amendment cases arising under 42 U.S.C. §1983 are acute and recurring in the State of California where the state maintains a prison population of some 120,000 souls, and as the Court has observed in passing, the "prison medical care system is broken beyond repair." Brown v. Plata, 179 L.Ed.2d 969, 985 (2011). The dispositive question in these cases is often whether the medical care provided violates professional standards of care.

In California prison officials' standard response to such allegations is to move for summary judgment, having their employee expert witness physician summarily declare to the federal court that the care provided met minimal professional standards, which he admittedly declares in 100% of such cases. Assuming the prisoner plaintiff lacks there wherewithal to secure a medical expert with a conflicting opinion, that concludes the Eighth Amendment matter, as this case illustrates. The net effect is to nullify this Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence and to embolden prison officials to continue to refuse to provide minimally adequate medical care.

There is a decades long circuit split on the question of law of whether expert medical testimony is necessary for an inadequate medical care deliberate indifference claim to survive a motion for summary judgment.

(1) At the summary judgment stage, is the plaintiff's failure to produce expert medical testimony condemning the care provided fatal to an inadequate medical care deliberate indifference claim?

(2) Do the standards of Federal Rule of Evidence 702 for expert opinon testimony apply at the summary judgment stage to an expert opinion that is unopposed by a conflicting expert opinion?

Whether expert medical testimony is necessary to survive summary judgment in an Eighth Amendment deliberate indifference claim