Lord v. Beahm, No. 19-1346 (7th Cir. 2020)
Annotate this CaseLord, an inmate at Wisconsin’s Waupun Correctional Institution, exposed himself to a female guard. After the guard told him that she would write him up and walked away, Lord began yelling that he had a razor blade and intended to kill himself. A short while later, a male guard went to Lord’s cell, ordered him out, and saw he had minor scratches treatable with a gauze bandage. Lord sued four guards for money damages under 42 U.S.C. 1983, alleging that they acted with deliberate indifference to a material risk to his life by not responding faster to his suicide threat. The Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the defendants. “Prison suicide is very real and very serious, but any fair reading of this record, even in the light most favorable to Lord, shows that he leveled an insincere threat of suicide to get attention and demonstrated no recoverable injury.”
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