The Supreme Court ruled on June 30 that a man claiming he was physically abused in federal prison may not pursue a specific kind of lawsuit against prison officials for damages.
That variety of lawsuit is known as a Bivens action, based on Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents (1971). In that ruling, the Supreme Court held that individuals may sue government officials for violations of their Fourth Amendment rights. That amendment shields individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
In the case at hand, the respondent, Andrew Fields, argued that the courts should allow his excessive-force lawsuit to proceed as a Bivens action under the Eighth Amendment. That amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishment.
As recently as 2022, the court said in Egbert v. Boule that recognizing a new kind of cause of action under Bivens is a “disfavored judicial activity.” A cause of action is a set of facts that provides a legal basis for suing someone.
In the court’s new unsigned opinion in Goldey v. Fields, the nation’s highest court summarily ruled against Fields, adhering to its longstanding policy of not expanding the scope of Bivens actions.
No justices dissented. No oral argument was held in the case.
The new opinion recounted the facts of the case.
The opinion said Fields was incarcerated and put into solitary confinement at the federal penitentiary in Lee County, Virginia. Fields alleged that prison officials there would “physically abuse” him. Court papers do not indicate why Fields was incarcerated.
Fields sued the petitioners—the federal Bureau of Prisons, the facility’s warden, and numerous prison officials—for damages in federal court, alleging prison officials violated the Eighth Amendment by using excessive force against him.
The opinion said the federal court in the Western District of Virginia threw out the lawsuit, finding he lacked a valid cause of action.
Because the Supreme Court “has never ruled that a damages remedy exists for claims of excessive force by [Bureau of Prisons] officers against an inmate,” the district court said it had “no difficulty in concluding that these claims arise in a new context” and that a Bivens action was not available to Fields.
A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed, finding that Fields could move forward with his Eighth Amendment-based excessive-force lawsuit. The panel found that no “special factors counseled against extending Bivens” to the case, the opinion said.
Circuit Judge Julius Richardson dissented, writing: “A faithful application of our precedent and the Supreme Court’s leads squarely to the conclusion that we cannot create a new Bivens action here.”
The petitioners asked the full circuit court to rehear the case, but it declined to do so.
Then-acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris told the Supreme Court in a March 3 brief that the Fourth Circuit ruling should be summarily reversed. Bivens actions filed against federal officials “can chill and disrupt officials’ performance of their duties, including in the prison-administration context.”
The government is concerned “about the severity of the court of appeals’ error and the gravity of the decision’s potential consequences,” the brief said.
The Supreme Court said in the new opinion that “extending Bivens to allow an Eighth Amendment claim for excessive force could have negative systemic consequences for prison officials and the ‘inordinately difficult undertaking’ of running a prison.”
Although Congress has enacted laws governing prisoner litigation, it has not created a cause of action for money damages. Besides, prisoners already have a system they can use to file grievances, the opinion said.
“For the past 45 years, this Court has consistently declined to extend Bivens to new contexts. We do the same here,” the opinion said.
The Supreme Court reversed the Fourth Circuit’s judgment and sent the case back to that court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared July 2, 2025, in The Epoch Times.