Training.

• Position: Brief Article

U.S. District Court

FAILURE TO TRAIN

Broulette v. Stains 161 F.Supp.2d 1021 (D.Ariz. 2001). A state inmate brought a [ss] 1983 action alleging that prison officials wrongfully withheld copies of an adult magazine to which he subscribed. The district court held that the magazines were not obscene, the prison officials were not entitled to qualified immunity from liability, and that punitive damages were not warranted. The court found the magazines, Hustler, were not obscene, even though the court noted that taken as a whole, the magazines clearly appealed to prurient interest and depicted or described sexual activity in a patently offensive way. But the magazines could not be withheld from the inmate as obscene because they appeared to "deliberately include content" that required anyone applying constitutional standard to conclude that it had some serious, literary, artistic, political or scientific value. The court denied qualified immunity to the prison officials because it concluded that no state prison official who objectively applied the obs cenity standard could have believed that the adult magazines did not comply with the standard. But the court held that an official's refusal to deliver copies of the magazines to the inmate was not in reckless or callous disregard of the inmates First Amendment rights, but rather that the official suffered from a lack of training and understanding of the fact that pornography and obscenity were not the...