Editor’s Note: Law Week Colorado edits court opinion summaries for style and, when necessary, length.
Jason Gentempo, a Denver deputy sheriff, and another Denver sheriff’s deputy went to Denver Health Medical Center to transport Serafin Finn to Denver Detention Center. DDC officers transported Finn there the day before to receive treatment for his multiple seizures.
As Gentempo entered the hospital, he heard Finn yelling and cursing at hospital staff.
The hospital restrained Finn to a gurney with handcuffs and leg irons. The deputies then placed Finn, who remained shackled, in a wheelchair with a blanket. The deputies wheeled Finn outside to the hospital’s ambulance bay.
Gentempo stood on the wheelchair’s left side as the other deputy pushed it. At the bottom of a ramp, Finn spat on the ground. Gentempo asked Finn not to spit, but Finn swore and spat at him — hitting Gentempo’s mouth, face and chin. Gentempo immediately punched Finn twice in the face and slammed his wheelchair backwards to the ground. Gentempo applied a mandibular angle pressure point hold once on the ground to prevent Finn from spitting again. Gentempo held Finn until hospital security staff arrived and placed a spit hood on him. Gentempo and two other deputies on scene helped Finn off the ground, got him into the van, and transported him back to DDC. Finn later died of causes unrelated to this case. Melissa Schwartz, as personal representative for the Estate of Serafin Finn, sued Gentempo, alleging a claim under Section 1983 of federal law. Gentempo moved for summary judgment, asserting qualified immunity from the estate’s Section 1983 claim. The district court denied the motion.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals held that plaintiffs may sue a state actor under Section 1983 for violating their federal rights. But to prevail, the appeals court noted they must show the state actor violated a clearly established right. This case considers whether the law clearly established that Gentempo violated pretrial detainee Serafin Finn’s 14th Amendment rights when he violently struck Finn for spitting on him. The district court denied Gentempo qualified immunity on summary judgment.
The 10th Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling.
The court noted that Gentempo doesn’t dispute that he violated Finn’s constitutional rights. He also doesn’t challenge the district court’s factual findings. He appealed only the district court’s conclusion that the law establishing the constitutional violation was clearly established.
The appeals court noted that generally, a constitutional right is clearly established when its or Supreme Court precedent exists putting the constitutional question beyond debate. But the court quoted its finding in Apodaca v. Raemisch in 2017 and noted that because some things are so obviously unlawful that they don’t require detailed explanation, qualified immunity doesn’t protect an officer where the constitutional violation was so obvious under general well-established constitutional principles that any reasonable officer would have known the conduct was unconstitutional.
El Dueno v. Mid-Century Insurance
Colorado provides a statutory remedy for insurance policy holders when insurers unreasonably delay or deny coverage. Under Colorado law, an insurer’s delay or claim denial is unreasonable if it does either without a reasonable basis.
El Dueno owns a commercial building in Greeley, Colorado. El Dueno’s Mid-Century-issued insurance policy on the building included coverage for direct physical loss caused by hail. On April 2, 2019, El Dueno submitted a claim to Mid-Century for roof damage sustained by a hailstorm from the previous July.
Mid-Century assigned claim adjuster, Maggie Fields, to investigate El Dueno’s roof. Fields found hail damage to the roof and estimated around $22,000 of damage. After applying depreciation and the policy’s deductible, Fields authorized, and Mid-Century paid, about $12,000.
El Dueno then hired a contractor to repair the roof, and that contractor estimated that repairing the roof and bringing it to code would cost $343,000. El Dueno submitted this updated estimate to Mid-Century, and Mid-Century reassigned El Dueno’s claim to large-loss adjuster Patrick McCourt. McCourt reinspected the property and hired Rimkus Engineering to determine whether hail damaged the roof. McCourt also hired an HVAC consultant, HVACi, to assess the roof’s HVAC units.
HVACi determined that hail damaged several rooftop HVAC units and prepared a repair estimate of $8,134.31. McCourt added HVACi’s estimates to Fields’s to update the repair estimate to $28,909.43. Mid-Century then sent El Dueno another payment for rooftop HVAC repair.
Rimkus engineer William Templeton inspected the roof on Dec. 12, 2019 — a day where ice and snow covered portions of the roof.
Templeton concluded that hail didn’t damage the roof and that any damage to the roof was preexisting or came from other causes. After receiving Templeton’s report, Mid-Century notified El Dueno that its policy didn’t cover the roof repairs, but that it would not seek to recoup the previously disbursed payments.
In April 2021, El Dueno sued Mid-Century in Colorado state court. Mid-Century removed to federal district court, and El Dueno amended its complaint to assert a single claim for unreasonable delay or denial of covered benefits under state law. During litigation, Mid-Century retained another engineer, John Peterson, to inspect the roof and review Templeton’s report. Peterson agreed with Templeton that hail didn’t damage the roof and its tiles. El Dueno’s expert Kerry Freeman, by contrast, found hail damaged the roof and questioned whether Templeton could see enough of the roof given the patches of snow and ice still present during his investigation.
Mid-Century moved for summary judgment, asserting that El Dueno couldn’t establish that it refused coverage without a reasonable basis. The district court granted Mid-Century’s motion. El Dueno appealed.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decided whether Mid-Century Insurance Company had a reasonable basis for refusing coverage for El Dueno’s roof repairs. The district court granted Mid-Century summary judgment, holding that El Dueno failed to show that Mid-Century acted unreasonably or violated industry standards by relying on a particular expert report.
The 10th Circuit affirmed.