Martha Stringer and Pual Stringer v. County of Bucks, et al.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania personal Injury lawyers represented the plaintiff on a civil rights violation claim.



In spring 2020, Plaintiffs Martha and Paul Stringer received news that any parent would dread: Their daughter,

Kimberly, who had long struggled with severe mental illness, had been detained after an altercation with a neighbor and was being mistreated by the staff of the Bucks County Correctional Facility (BCCF), where she was being held. After Kimberly was finally transferred to a mental hospital and then released, the Stringers sued the County of Bucks and various BCCF corrections officers on Kimberly's behalf,1 alleging that the officers' actions—which included pepper spraying Kimberly and subjecting her to a restraint chair—violated her Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from excessive force. The District Court concluded the Stringers sufficiently pleaded a violation of Kimberly's Fourteenth Amendment rights and denied Defendants' motion to dismiss, reasoning that a more developed factual record was needed to ascertain whether the Defendants were entitled to qualified immunity.

While the Stringers’ complaint states a claim for a violation of a constitutional right, namely, Kimberly’s right to be free from the use of excessive force, it is not sufficiently detailed to enable the Court to define that right with more specificity and then assess whether that right was clearly established, as required for qualified immunity.



Because the District Court correctly determined that Defendants’ entitlement to qualified immunity is not clear from the face of the complaint, we will affirm and remand for limited discovery as needed for a fact-specific qualified immunity analysis.