United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 22-3230 MINOSA ECHOLS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. TERESA JOHNSON, et al., Defendants-Appellees. ____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois. No. 4:20-cv-04054-SEM-KLM — Sue E. Myerscough, Judge. ____________________

ARGUED NOVEMBER 29, 2023 — DECIDED JUNE 27, 2024 ____________________

Before RIPPLE, SCUDDER, and JACKSON-AKIWUMI, Circuit Judges. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge. Minosa Echols, a civil detainee in an Illinois facility, suffered serious injuries when a fellow res- ident attacked him in a dayroom. Echols sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that three security officers present during the assault violated his rights under the Fourteenth Amend- ment’s Due Process Clause by failing to protect him from the other resident. The case proceeded to trial, and the jury 2 No. 22-3230 returned a defense verdict. Echols appeals, relying on our re- cent decision in Kemp v. Fulton County, 27 F.4th 491 (7th Cir. 2022), and contending that the district court committed a legal error by instructing the jury that success on a failure-to-pro- tect claim required a showing that the officer in question was subjectively aware that the other resident presented a risk of harm to Echols. We agree that the jury instruction was erroneous—in par- ticular, that Echols did not need to prove subjective aware- ness of the risk of harm to establish liability. On the point most contested by the parties, the jury should have been instructed to answer whether a reasonable officer in the defendant’s shoes would have appreciated that the conditions within the dayroom put Echols at risk of harm, and, from there, whether the defendant acted in an objectively unreasonable way in ad- dressing that risk. But to prevail on appeal Echols must also show that the error prejudiced him. And it is on that front that his claim fails. What happened here was so unexpected that no reasonable officer, in the circumstances before them, would have anticipated the surprise attack or taken different measures to protect Echols. In the end, then, we affirm. I A On September 16, 2019, Minosa Echols, a civil detainee at the Illinois Department of Human Services’ Treatment and Detention Facility in Rushville, met his soon-to-be roommate, Paul Rexroat, in a hallway. The two immediately started bick- ering. For his part, Rexroat made clear he did not want a roommate and instead strongly preferred to continue living alone, in part because, as he put it, he “liked to be naked in No. 22-3230 3 his room.” Echols did not react well to Rexroat’s statements and responded with a threat. Rexroat reported the threat to Officer Steven Brown, who documented the “tension” be- tween the two men while also observing that he thought they would find a way to work things out. Officer Brown later tes- tified that it was common for residents not to want to move or acquire new roommates. Officer Brown did not share any information about Ech- ols’s threat, including its occurrence, with the defendants in this case: Officers Teresa Johnson, Scott Wallace, and Richard Logan. Rexroat, however, spoke with Officers Johnson and Wallace the following morning—September 17, the day of the incident. But those officers testified that they did not recall Rexroat relaying any concerns about Echols. All Officer Wal- lace remembered was that Rexroat did not seem angry the morning of the incident. Echols arrived at his new room at approximately 8:30 a.m. o