4th Circuit revives claim of unsanitary food, Free Exercise violation at Baltimore County jail

A federal appellate court has revived a Baltimore County man’s lawsuit challenging the conditions of confinement at the Baltimore County Detention Center, finding the lower court erred in dismissing the man’s constitutional claims that the jail provided rotten and unsafe food and denied him the ability to practice his religion.

In a published opinion with Judge Roger Gregory writing for the 2-1 panel majority, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit found Terrence Edward Hammock sufficiently pleaded a claim of deliberate indifference based on his sickness from alleged rotten and mice-bitten food provided by the jail, and sufficiently pleaded a claim under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause based on “unjustified burdens” on his constitutionally-protected religious expression.

The 4th Circuit also held the more than one dozen administrators and correctional officers of the jail Hammock named as defendants in the case are not entitled to qualified immunity on his claims at this stage.

In finding the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland erred in granting the defendants’ motion to dismiss, the 4th Circuit remanded the case to the district court with instructions to appoint counsel for Hammock.

“Hammock’s allegations regarding contaminated food — at the motion to dismiss stage, and particularly as pleaded by a pro se litigant — are sufficient, as they establish both ‘a serious or significant physical… injury’ and ‘a substantial risk of such serious harm,’ ” Gregory wrote.

The appellate court noted that the fact that Hammock did not specifically plead the symptoms of his sickness “is not fatal to his claim at this stage.” Hammock sufficiently alleged the jail’s administrators and correctional officers knew of the risk of harm from the food, the court wrote, where Hammock sent two letters to the director of the county’s department of corrections in February 2022 complaining about the alleged unsafe food and the letters were marked as “received” and “processed as [] Inmate Complaint[s]” but issues with the food continued the following month.

The 4th Circuit additionally found Hammock’s claim that he was not allowed to attend Muslim Friday prayer services was a sufficient pleading, where the defendants’ citing the need for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic does not account for the prayer services before and after the pandemic that Hammock says the defendants denied him access to.

Brian Wolfman, director of the Georgetown University Law Center’s appellate courts immersion clinic, which represented Hammock on appeal, said the clinic is pleased with the 4th Circuit’s ruling, where Hammock won on every issue of the case.

“We thought that Mr. Hammock had been wronged in exactly the ways that the court indicated he may be able to prove,” Wolfman said in a phone call Thursday. “He now has the opportunity to prove his case.”

Hammock filed a pro se lawsuit in February 2022 in the U.S. District Court for Maryland, alleging various issues that have been ongoing “since he arrived” at the Baltimore County Detention Center in September 2019. He alleged he became sick several times after eating the food served at the jail, which he says included “rotten apples, and meat with mice bites.” To avoid becoming sick, Hammock said he stopped eating the meals served at the jail and instead subsisted on food purchased from the prison commissary, causing him to lose weight.

Hammock also alleged the Baltimore County Detention Center denied him the ability to practice his religion by not allowing him to attend Jum’ah, a gathering of Muslims for group prayer on Fridays, during his detention at the jail.

In a separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, Judge Allison Jones Rushing agreed with the majority’s finding that the district court erred in dismissing Hammock’s Free Exercise claim but wrote she would have affirmed the dismissal of Hammock’s Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment claims relating to the jail’s food.

“Hammock’s factual allegations about the food BCDC provides ‘have not nudged [his] claims’ of constitutional deprivation ‘across the line from conceivable to plausible,’” Rushing wrote.

A jury in the Baltimore County Circuit Court previously convicted Hammock on charges of home invasion and robbery, where the court sentenced him to a total executed sentence of 100 years’ imprisonment. The Maryland Appellate Court upheld the sentence on appeal.

A spokesperson for Baltimore County declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.