“Let Him Marinate”

On December 14, 2020, Derrick Jones sat handcuffed in a medical room inside the St. Louis City Justice Center as Lieutenant Javan Fowlkes walked in and sprayed him directly for seven continuous seconds. Jones had been shouting that his skin was burning, he could not breathe, and his lungs were closing. Fowlkes followed the spray with three words: “Let him marinate.”

The case reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit before trial, so the judges had to accept Derrick’s account unless the record plainly disproved it. Nothing did. Judge L. Steven Grasz wrote for a unanimous panel that included Judges James B. Loken and Raymond W. Gruender. They held that a jury could find the seven-second spray unconstitutional and that existing law gave Fowlkes fair warning.

The same three judges reached the opposite conclusion about a spray Fowlkes used minutes earlier. Video showed Derrick lunge toward Lieutenant Sherry Richard and continue resisting as officers took him to the floor. Fowlkes used mace to protect Richard and help complete the restraint. The court held that deployment was reasonable.

Jones v. City of St. Louis, issued July 27, 2026, turns on the interval between those two sprays. The justification for force rose with the threat and fell when officers gained control. Derrick’s earlier defiance remained part of the history, but it could not justify another use of force after the danger passed.

The ruling divided the case by person and moment. Some officers won immunity, others did not, and Derrick and Jerome Jones lost their individual water-deprivation claims. The claims against St. Louis remain before the district court because the Eighth Circuit lacked jurisdiction to decide them in this appeal. No defendant has been found liable, and an officer who lost qualified immunity at summary judgment may renew the defense at trial on the facts proved there.

One Officer, Two Constitutional Answers

Earlier that day, Derrick had asked to transfer cells because his cellmate showed symptoms of COVID-19. Richard ordered him back into the cell. He refused. She returned with mace, and she and Fowlkes repeated the order as Derrick paced through the common area and briefly entered a space reserved for officers.

Then Derrick stopped. He stood with his arms crossed for nearly two minutes. Eight officers were in the room, and every other detainee had been cleared out. Richard sprayed him for about one second.

The panel denied Richard qualified immunity. Derrick had ignored repeated commands, but the court examined what he was doing when Richard used force. He was standing still, surrounded, and presented no “real threat.” The officers had not attempted a lesser means of moving him. The asserted COVID concern also collapsed under the chronology: officers had allowed him to move through the common area only minutes earlier.

Video showed Derrick lunge toward Richard after she sprayed him. Officers took him down, and he continued physically resisting while they tried to restrain him. Fowlkes sprayed him during that struggle. The immediate security purpose was clear: protect Richard and help the officers gain control. The panel reversed the denial of immunity for that deployment.

After officers handcuffed Derrick, they took him to the medical room. The struggle had ended. He sat restrained and compliant, already reporting respiratory distress, when Fowlkes entered and sprayed him for seven seconds.

The court relied on a line of Eighth Circuit decisions holding that chemical force against a restrained, nonresistant person violates clearly established law. In Walker v. Bowersox and Lawrence v. Bowersox, officers lost immunity after spraying confined prisoners and leaving them exposed to the chemical. In May 2026, Bolin v. Wilkins denied immunity after an officer fired pepper-spray balls at a detainee who stood inside a cell with his arms raised and presented no immediate threat.

Under Kingsley v. Hendrickson, a pretrial detainee does not have to prove that an officer acted with a particular malicious state of mind. The question is whether the force was objectively unreasonable in light of the security problem the officer faced. Fowlkes’s words supply their own context. Once Derrick was cuffed and compliant, “let him marinate” described pain continuing after the reason for force had ended.

The Court Sorted Every Deployment

The district court had denied qualified immunity without separately analyzing each officer and each incident. Section 1983 imposes personal liability for a person’s own conduct, so the Eighth Circuit rejected the collective treatment. Several incidents appeared on video, and extensive depositions developed the others. Rather than send the case back for another initial analysis, the panel performed the sorting itself.

On December 19, 2020, Lieutenant Aisha Turner used a one-second spray against Darnell Rusan. Turner had entered a housing unit after another officer reported smelling smoke. Rusan argued with the officers, became increasingly agitated, and ignored at least five orders to enter his cell. Only two officers were present among several unsecured detainees. Immediately after Turner sprayed him, Rusan picked up a chair and threw it at her. The panel held that she faced a fast-moving security problem and used reasonable nonlethal force.

Rusan’s encounter with Fowlkes on February 3, 2021, produced the opposite result. Officers took Rusan to a visiting booth for a strip search. He complied, and they found no contraband. As he put his boxer shorts back on, he asked the searching officer, “Hey, you like this job, man?” The officer ordered him to submit to another search. A second officer suggested letting him return to his cell, but the searching officer summoned Fowlkes and said Rusan was refusing.

Fowlkes entered the booth, sprayed Rusan, and left him in the mace-filled space for three to four hours without medical attention or a way to remove the residue from his body and clothes. The panel accepted that evidence at summary judgment and held that force against a restrained, nonresistant detainee presented a triable constitutional claim.

On February 9, 2021, Jerome Jones refused an order to move cells. Fowlkes handcuffed him, took him to a visiting booth, sprayed him, and left him in the closed room for about thirty minutes. Jerome yelled that he could not breathe and lay on the floor “to suck some air from under the door.” No one gave him medical attention or allowed him to shower. That claim also survived.

The outcomes did not turn on whether a detainee had ever disobeyed an order. Rusan and Jerome both had. The panel asked what threat remained when the chemical was used, whether the person was restrained, what the officer was trying to accomplish, and how long the exposure continued. The constitutional answer changed with those facts.

Incompatible Directions on Withers

The posted opinion contains incompatible directions concerning Marrell Withers’s first-spray claim.

On January 7, 2022, medical staff suspected that Withers had COVID-19 and wanted him moved to an isolation area. Video showed him pacing while handcuffed and then sitting near an officer station. He refused orders to stand and threatened to break a computer several feet away. He warned the officers that he had asthma. When Correctional Officer Douglas Jones first sprayed him, Withers was seated, handcuffed, masked, and surrounded by five officers. He then stood, turned toward the wall, and resisted the escort. Douglas Jones sprayed him a second time for less than one second.

The panel ruled that Correctional Officer Douglas Jones was not entitled to qualified immunity for the first burst. Withers sat restrained among five officers and presented no immediate threat sufficient to justify the spray. The court separately cleared Douglas Jones and Captain Freddie Wills of the claim based on the failure to provide a shower or clean clothing after the transfer because neither man controlled Withers’s treatment at that point.

Two paragraphs after denying Douglas Jones qualified immunity for the first spray, the panel reversed the denial of qualified immunity “as to Officer Jones and Captain Wills.” The analysis and disposition language cannot both govern the first-spray claim. A corrected opinion, amended judgment, or later clarification may resolve the conflict; otherwise the district court will have to determine how to implement the mandate.

The Claims Against the City

Each officer’s immunity turned on a single moment. The claims against St. Louis ask a broader question: whether city policy or a widespread custom produced repeated uses of mace and punitive water shutoffs. The City tried to bring those claims into the officers’ immediate appeal. It also sought review of Americans with Disabilities Act claims brought by Withers and Rusan, who say the jail failed to account for medical conditions that made chemical agents especially dangerous.

The panel dismissed those parts of the appeal for lack of jurisdiction. Officers may immediately appeal a legal ruling denying qualified immunity; a city has no equivalent immunity from suit. The municipal and disability claims depend on different proof and survived the officer-specific rulings.

The municipal claims rely on discovery extending beyond the incidents discussed in the appellate opinion. The four named plaintiffs sought to represent a class, but the district court denied certification. Their individual and citywide claims nevertheless generated discovery into video preservation, use-of-force reports, chemical-agent purchases, training, internal review, and water shutoffs.

In January 2023, the plaintiffs filed an emergency motion to preserve surveillance video. Their filing attached correspondence in which City counsel said corrections personnel were pulling and saving footage. It also described testimony from the City’s designated corporate witness: surveillance video ordinarily deleted after sixty days; staff had been told to preserve use-of-force footage after the lawsuit began; and not every chemical-agent deployment had been exempted from automatic deletion. The plaintiffs accused the City of knowingly allowing relevant footage to disappear while discovery disputes remained pending. Video of other deployments mattered because the municipal claim depends on proof of a pattern beyond the four named plaintiffs.

By July 2023, the plaintiffs’ lawyers reported that City officials had deleted nearly 80% of the footage responsive to their requests. They also published their review of City records. Of 1,241 use-of-force reports produced in the case, internal reviewers found only nine unjustified. Their review identified at least 250 chemical-agent deployments against passively resistant detainees, at least 50 involving people on suicide watch, and 70 uses of large Sabre Red MK-9 canisters against individual detainees.

The City can contest how the incidents were classified, why the footage disappeared, and what the records prove about policy, notice, causation, and deliberate indifference. The Eighth Circuit made no findings on those questions, which remain before the district court.

Procurement records add scale without proving misuse. In March 2021, the City ordered $17,379 in pepper-spray products: 100 16-ounce “cell buster” canisters, 200 other 16-ounce canisters, and 500 3-ounce canisters. The cell-buster attachment could slide under a door and discharge the chemical into an enclosed space; 16-ounce products were ordinarily used for crowd control. The order was nearly three times the City’s total pepper-spray purchases in 2020.

City officials offered security and administrative explanations. The acting corrections commissioner tied the unusually large order to repeated uprisings, noted that the inventory served both city jails, and pointed to a budget calendar that prevented new orders for part of the year. A plaintiffs’ lawyer declined to infer motive from the purchase alone. The written jail policy permitted chemical force when staff safety was threatened or a detainee actively resisted, and it prohibited using the spray as punishment. The municipal claim asks whether officers followed that policy or replaced it with another practice.

Water and Personal Responsibility

The water claims show the limits of the individual appeal. Jerome testified that water was cut after detainees broke windows and activated sprinklers, flooding housing units. He did not identify Fowlkes as the person responsible. Derrick identified Fowlkes, but testified that each shutoff lasted no more than twelve hours and that detainees received fluids with meals.

The court granted Fowlkes immunity on those claims. Jerome lacked evidence connecting him to the shutoff, and Derrick had not shown that temporary restrictions were excessive compared with the jail’s stated purpose of stopping floods and securing the facility.

The broader water claim against St. Louis remains in the district court. The plaintiffs must prove that the City used plumbing shutoffs as punishment, that policymakers knew of the practice, and that it caused a constitutional injury. The appellate ruling resolved only the evidence against Fowlkes on Derrick’s and Jerome’s individual claims.

Oversight at the Lobby Door

The fight over access to jail records had a physical counterpart at the lobby door. St. Louis created the Detention Facilities Oversight Board to receive complaints, issue subpoenas, and enter city detention facilities to inspect conditions.

On August 31, 2023, board vice chair Janis Mensah went to the jail after a detainee died in custody. Mensah said the visit fell within the board’s work and waited in the lobby for access. Jail staff said the lobby was closing and repeatedly ordered Mensah to leave. Mensah maintained that the oversight ordinance authorized the visit. Police arrived, took Mensah to the floor, and placed the board vice chair in handcuffs. The City charged Mensah with trespassing and resisting arrest.

The municipal prosecution continued for nearly two years. On July 24, 2025, Associate Circuit Judge Rochelle Woodiest granted Mensah’s motion for acquittal after the City failed to introduce the ordinance underlying its charges. A jury had been seated but did not decide the case. Mensah later filed a federal civil-rights action alleging excessive force and other constitutional violations. That lawsuit remains pending.

The Mensah lawsuit is separate from Jones. One concerns the preservation of evidence in pending litigation; the other concerns an oversight board member’s claimed authority to enter the jail. Both remain unresolved civil-rights disputes.

Back to the District Court

The case returns to St. Louis in separate parts. Turner and Fowlkes won immunity where the judges found an immediate security problem or physical resistance. Richard and Fowlkes still face claims arising from force used when detainees stood still, sat restrained, or otherwise presented no real threat. The opinion contains incompatible directions concerning Withers’s first-spray claim against Correctional Officer Douglas Jones. The plaintiffs’ Monell and ADA claims against the City remain for further proceedings.

The plaintiffs must prove what happened, who caused each injury, and whether the surviving incidents grew from a city policy or custom. The City can challenge the plaintiffs’ reading of its reports, the significance of missing footage, the connection between procurement and use, and the existence of any citywide practice. Settlement, renewed motions, trial, and another appeal all remain possible.