As we explained in our case summary, the question in this case was whether the State was liable for an assault of an inmate by a corrections officer, which was not within the scope of the officer’s employment. The Court (DiFiore, CJ.) held that the State was not liable in this case, and therefore affirmed the dismissal of the claimant’s claims on summary judgment.
The majority applied common-law respondeat superior principles in determining whether the State could be vicariously liable for the corrections officer’s conduct in this case. As the Court explained, those principles make an employer vicarious liability for its employees’ intentional torts “so long as the tortious conduct is generally foreseeable and a natural incident of the employment.” But if the employees’ conduct “departs from the line of duty so that for the time being their acts constitute an abandonment of service, the employer is not liable.” Here, the majority viewed the officer’s conduct as a “malicious attack completely divorced from the employer’s interests” and concluded that the “gratuitous and utterly unauthorized use of force was so egregious as to constitute a significant departure from the normal methods of performance of the duties of a correction officer as a matter of law.”
The dissent (Rivera, J.) would have concluded that unresolved fact questions precluded summary judgment for the State. The dissent noted that the State’s liability could be premised on the conduct of other corrections officers during the assault. In the dissent’s view, there was a question of fact as to whether those other officers were acting in the scope of their employment, even if the officer who committed the assault was not acting within the scope of his employment.
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