by Douglas Ankney

On April 21, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit consolidated two appeals of prisoner plaintiff Joseph Z. Womble, vacated the district court’s award of costs to prison officials Jerry Chrisman and Tommy Sharp (“Defendants”), and reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgement to Defendants on Womble’s Eighth Amendment claim alleging denial of access to functioning showers and toilets, as well as exposure to other prisoners’ feces and urine.

Womble is an Oklahoma state prisoner and from May 1, 2014, to February 23, 2016, he was assigned to the A-South unit at the Mack Alford Correctional Center (MACC) in Atoka. A-South included, inter alia, several common areas, a day room, and 50 cells with each cell containing two bunks and one toilet. On May 1, 2014, MACC received 128 prisoners from Oklahoma County jails, which increased A-South’s prisoner population from 100 to 128.

Because of an insufficient number of cells in A-South, 32 temporary bunks were constructed in the common areas. MACC left three cells vacant in A-South so that prisoners assigned to temporary bunks could access the toilets in those cells. Womble was assigned to a temporary bunk. Womble alleged in his 42 U.S.C. section 1983 complaint that, beginning in June 2014, prisoners began breaking or removing the lightbulbs from the toilet areas. He also alleged that the toilets began clogging, and that some prisoners remained in the toilet areas “for hours at a time … shooting dope or doing whatever.” The toilet conditions deteriorated with “maintenance problems all the time, toilets overflowing,” prisoners “staying in the bathrooms for hours,” and prisoners “fighting in the bathrooms.” These conditions resulted in “long waits for the bathrooms.”

Exacerbating the problem, MACC began using the bathrooms as holding cells for prisoners who had been fighting and were awaiting transfer to the Special Housing Unit. During these periods, only one or two bathrooms remained for the 32 prisoners assigned to temporary bunks. And when a prisoner locked himself inside one of those bathrooms, the remaining prisoners had to wait hours to use a toilet.

Womble soiled himself on five different occasions while waiting in these long lines to use the toilet. Other prisoners ridiculed him and he “felt less than human,” “disgusting,” and “out of control.” Womble always wore his boots and rolled up his pants when going to the bathrooms because the clogged toilets often overflowed, with urine and feces on the floor. On more than one occasion, the prison food made Womble ill and he vomited with his face inches above a toilet overflowing with human waste.

Because the lightbulbs were missing, the bathrooms were dark and Womble had to “feel around” to find the toilet. Womble always wore his shower shoes in the showers. The drains were often clogged with hair and soap. This resulted in water rising on the shower floor. And there were also long waits to access the showers. Defendants were aware of these issues. Chrisman admitted that he walked A-South daily and personally observed the “open and obvious” conditions.

Additionally, Womble personally spoke with Defendants in August 2014 and again in October 2014, informing them he “was being exposed to feces,” to which they responded “nothing can be done,” “this is a permanent situation” and “you’ll just have to do your time.” The Defendants moved to dismiss Womble’s complaint for failure to state a claim. The district court granted the motion. But the Tenth Circuit reversed and remanded, concluding, among other things, that Womble had stated a plausible claim of failure to maintain sanitary facilities.

On remand, the district court granted summary judgment to Defendants on their claim that Womble had failed to exhaust his administrative remedies. The Tenth Circuit again reversed and remanded, concluding that MACC had not provided Womble with a usable grievance process so there were no available administrative remedies to exhaust.

On the second remand, the district court again granted summary judgment to the Defendants after concluding that Womble had failed to identify sufficient evidence to support his claims. Following entry of this judgment, the district court granted Defendants’ motion for an award of $5,589.60 for costs. In separate appeals, Womble appealed the award of costs and the summary judgment dismissal.

The Tenth Circuit consolidated the appeals and observed that although “[t]he Constitution does not mandate comfortable prisons,” it does not “permit inhumane ones, and it is now settled that the treatment a prisoner receives in prison and the conditions under which he is confined are subject to scrutiny under the Eighth Amendment.” See: Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994).

The Court wrote, “The Amendment also imposes duties on these officials, who must provide humane conditions of confinement; prison officials must ensure that inmates receive adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care, and must take reasonable measures to guarantee the safety of the inmates.”

“An inmate making an Eighth Amendment claim for constitutionally inadequate conditions of confinement must allege and prove an objective component and a subjective component associated with the deficiency,” the Court continued, citing Shannon v. Graves, 257 F.3d 1164 (10th Cir. 2001). “The objective component requires conditions sufficiently serious so as to deprive inmates of the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities” or conditions “sufficiently serious so as to constitute a substantial risk of serious harm.… The subjective component requires that a … prison official have a culpable state of mind, [such that] that he or she acts or fails to act with deliberate indifference to inmate health and safety.”

As to Womble’s inaccessible toilets claims, the Tenth Circuit added, “The prisoner must show the defendants ‘knew he faced a substantial risk of harm and disregarded that risk by failing to take reasonable measures to abate it.…[T]he lack of access to working toilets” and any related “exposure to other inmates’ urine and feces via … standing water” is sufficient to “state a successful conditions of confinement claim … Exposure to human waste, like few other conditions of confinement, evokes both the health concerns emphasized in Farmer and the more general standards of dignity embodied in the Eighth Amendment.”

Citing McBride v. Deer, 240 F.3d 1287 (10th Cir. 2001), the Court had concluded that, while “conditions such as a filthy cell [covered with feces] may be tolerable for a few days,” “the length of time required before a constitutional violation is made out decreases as the level of filthiness increases.” (The McBride court concluded that three days in such cell conditions “demonstrated a sufficiently serious condition of confinement.”)

The Tenth Circuit found that Womble’s evidence, recounted above, “established a triable issue on the objective component of an Eighth Amendment violation based on the regular presence of feces on the floors of the toilets and overflowing, the lack of adequate lighting in the toilet areas, and the inadequacy of the toilets-to-inmates ratio.”

In reaching that conclusion, the Court rejected the district court’s reliance on work orders purportedly showing the repair of toilets and showers. That is, while the work orders showed these repairs occurring on the date of the work orders, Womble testified that the toilets and showers were in states of disrepair long before staff submitted the work orders.

The Court likewise concluded that Womble had created a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether the Defendants knew about the unsanitary conditions and failed to take reasonable measures to abate them. The district court had observed that there was “conflicting evidence” on the issue of the extent of the Defendants’ knowledge and ruled that “no reasonable juror could find in Mr. Womble’s favor in light of additional conflicting evidence.”

But the Tenth Circuit observed that: (1) the district court failed to identify the “additional conflicting evidence”; and (2) the district court “erred by resolving disputed issues of material fact in favor of Defendants because ‘[w]e view the evidence in the light most favorable to the non-moving party, resolving all disputed facts and making all reasonable inferences in his favor.’”

Because Womble had satisfied both the objective and subjective components on these inadequate facilities claim, the Court reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgment. And because of the reversal, the award of costs must be vacated since the reversal meant “the prevailing party” was yet to be established and only a prevailing party is entitled to an award of costs.

Accordingly, the Court reversed and remanded for further proceedings on Womble’s unsanitary conditions claim and remanded with instructions to vacate the award of costs to the Defendants. See: Womble v. Chrisman, 173 F.4th 1186 (10th Cir. 2026). 

Subscribe today

Already a subscriber? Login

Related legal case