Issues Arising in Institutional Litigation, part 5 of 8: Training

Training

Over the past decade, courts have ruled on the liability of institutional administrators and supervisors for a wide range of conduct relating to the hiring, training, supervising, assigning, directing, and retaining of staff. Liability may be imposed if supervisors hire unqualified people, fail to train staff adequately, fail to supervise staff on the job, fail to provide staff with formal policy and procedural guidelines, or fail to fire unfit staff. These issues typically arise in cases where injuries or death have occurred and staff have not been trained to handle suicidal children or medical emergencies.


Failure to properly hire or train personnel may constitute indifference to the rights or safety of others and may support liability for punitive damages under Smith v. Wade. This case is particularly relevant where there is a governmental pattern of deliberate indifference resulting in injury to the plaintiff (see Partridge v. Two Unknown Police Officers of the City of Houston, Texas, and McKenna v. City of Memphis). The right to properly trained staff is well established. Thus, in Garrett v. Rader, where the plaintiff’s developmentally disabled daughter died in restraints administered by untrained staff, the defendants were not permitted to claim qualified immunity. Under City of Canton, Ohio, v. Harris, a failure to train employees may also form the basis for municipal liability in federal civil rights litigation. The issue is whether the training program is adequate and, if it is not, whether the inadequate training can justifiably be said to represent city policy. Thus, in Simmons v. City of Philadelphia, the city’s policy or custom of not training its officers to deal with suicidal inmates amounted to deliberate indifference to inmates’ serious medical needs. Similarly, Gobel v. Maricopa County holds that a government entity may be liable for the failure to train properly its employees if there is a connection between the violation of civil rights and the inadequate training (see Davis v. Mason County and Young v. Augusta, Georgia).