Jonathan Peoples v. Cook County and Thomas J. Dart

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 23-1454
JONATHAN PEOPLES ,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
C OOK C OUNTY AND THOMAS J. DART,
Defendants-Appellees.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 1:19-cv-07712 — Charles P. Kocoras, Judge.
____________________
A RGUED M AY 14, 2024 — DECIDED F EBRUARY 18, 2025
____________________
Before S YKES , Chief Judge, and PRYOR and K OLAR , Circuit
Judges.
K OLAR , Circuit Judge. On the Friday before a holiday week-
end, Jonathan Peoples pleaded guilty to felony possession of
a controlled substance under Illinois state law. Peoples was
sentenced to one year of incarceration plus one year of man-
datory supervised release, and he received credit for time
served that exceeded his term of incarceration. As Illinois law
requires, the state court ordered the Cook County Sheriff’s

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2 No. 23-1454
Office to deliver Peoples to the Illinois Department of Correc-
tions for processing onto supervised release. But because
IDOC does not accept inmate transfers on weekends or holi-
days, the Sheriff’s Office detained Peoples at the Cook County
Jail until he could be transferred to IDOC four days later.
Once Peoples arrived at IDOC, they processed and released
him that same day.
Peoples brought a Section 1983 claim against Cook
County and Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart in his official
capacity, alleging that he was detained beyond the end of his
sentence in violation of his constitutional rights. He argues on
appeal that the district court mistakenly concluded that the
Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments did not apply to his
claim, and in the alternative, that the district court erred when
it determined that he had not presented a triable Eighth
Amendment claim. Because the district court’s analysis was
correct, we affirm.
I. Background
We begin with an overview of the relevant state and
county policies that governed Peoples’s release before turning
to the factual and procedural history.
A. Illinois Department of Corrections Policy
In Illinois, certain prisoners, like Peoples, are provided
with “one day of sentence credit for each day of his or her
sentence of imprisonment or recommitment ... [and] [e]ach
day of sentence credit shall reduce by one day the prisoner’s
period of imprisonment or recommitment....” 730 ILCS 5/3-6-
3(a)(2.1). The Illinois Department of Corrections has exclusive
responsibility to calculate state prisoners’ sentences, includ-
ing awarding or subtracting sentence credit. 20 Ill. Adm. Code

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No. 23-1454 3
§§107.110(c), 107.150(a). The IDOC is also charged with as-
sessing whether sentences have been appropriately served. Id.
At the end of their custodial sentences, convicted felons in Il-
linois are required to serve a term of mandatory supervised
release. 730 ILCS 5/5-4.5-15(c); 730 ILCS 5/5-8-1(d). As with
calculating sentences, IDOC has sole authority to process in-
mates onto mandatory supervised release. 730 ILCS 5/3-14-
2(a). IDOC’s processing procedures include verification of
sentence credit, review of the offender’s file, determination of
a host site for supervision, a check for holds and warrants,
identification measures that include a photograph and DNA
and fingerprint collection, and a medical examination. At the
time of the events in this case, IDOC required processing and
sentence calculation for male inmates to be performed by
IDOC staff only.
After a felony sentencing occurs, certain individuals are
known as “turnarounds.” Turnarounds are those who re-
ceived a sentence of incarceration that includes credit equal to
or exceeding the time to be served, so they are transferred to
IDOC only for processing onto supervised release. During the
relevant period, IDOC’s Reception Center accepted transfers
from 8:00 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thurs-
days, and Fridays. They did not accept transfers on Wednes-
days, during the weekend, or on holidays.
B. Cook County Sheriff’s Office Policy
Individuals sentenced to IDOC custody, including turna-
rounds, were transported that same day by the Sheriff’s Office
from the sentencing courthouse to the Cook County Jail. At
the Jail, a unit of the Cook County Department of Corrections
reviewed each individual’s sentencing paperwork to

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4 No. 23-1454
determine whether the individual should remain in custody
or be discharged.
For individuals who needed to be transferred to state cus-
tody for processing, the Sheriff’s Office would schedule trans-
portation to the IDOC Reception Center for the next day that
IDOC accepted transfers, with a goal of arriving by 8:00 a.m.
Because IDOC did not accept transfers every day, sometimes
individuals remained at Cook County Jail until they could be
sent to IDOC.
C. Peoples’s Guilty Plea and Time in Custody
At around 1:00 p.m. on February 15, 2019—the Friday be-
fore Presidents’ Day weekend—Peoples pleaded guilty to
possession of a controlled substance, a felony. After accepting
his plea and finding him guilty, the judge sentenced him to
one year of imprisonment with IDOC and one year of manda-
tory supervised release.
When Peoples pleaded guilty, he had already spent 217
days in the custody of the Sheriff’s Office, 45 of which were at
the Cook County Jail, and the remainder of which were spent
out on bond and subject to electronic monitoring. Because the
judge credited Peoples with 217 days and then sentenced him
to 365 days of imprisonment, he effectively sentenced Peoples
to time-served plus mandatory supervised release. See 730
ILCS 5/3-6-3(a)(2.1) (providing that each day of sentence
credit reduces the sentence by the same number of days, so
Peoples’s 217 days of credit reduced his sentence to 148 days).
Even so, the judge did not order the Sheriff to release Peoples.
After all, IDOC still needed to complete its calculations and
process Peoples for supervised release. To that end, the judge
ordered the Cook County Sheriff to “take” Peoples “into

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No. 23-1454 5
custody,” although he already was in custody, and “deliver
him to the [IDOC],” which in turn would confine Peoples “in
a manner provided by law until the above sentence is ful-
filled.” Peoples understood when pleading guilty that he
would have to be processed out by IDOC before he could re-
turn home, but he did not expect to spend several days at the
Cook County Jail.
After the end of the sentencing hearing, the Sheriff’s Office
took Peoples from the Maywood, Illinois courthouse to the
Cook County Jail. The Sheriff did not immediately send Peo-
ples to IDOC because IDOC would not have accepted him un-
til the following Tuesday—Monday being Presidents’ Day.
Peoples was held in the general population of the Jail for four
nights. On the morning of Tuesday, February 19—the first
available time for transfer—the Sheriff transported Peoples to
the IDOC Reception Center, where he was processed and re-
leased that same day.
D. Procedural History
On behalf of himself and others similarly situated, Peoples
filed a putative class action in the Circuit Court of Cook
County pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 for violations of the
United States Constitution, the Illinois Constitution, and state
law. Peoples alleged that his constitutional rights were vio-
lated by the Cook County Sheriff Office’s policy or practice of
“detaining and re-incarcerating people after they are sen-
tenced to time served without any legal justification to do so.”
Defendants removed the suit to the U.S. District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois. After the close of discovery, De-
fendants moved for summary judgment.

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6 No. 23-1454
The district court granted Defendants’ motion. The district
court held that neither the Fourth Amendment nor Four-
teenth Amendment applied to Peoples’s overdetention claim,
and it instead applied the Eighth Amendment. In turn, the
district court concluded that Peoples failed to introduce suffi-
cient evidence that the Sheriff violated the Eighth Amend-
ment, and that without a constitutional violation, Peoples
could not establish a Section 1983 claim. The district court
granted summary judgment to Defendants on Peoples’s fed-
eral claims with prejudice and declined to exercise supple-
mental jurisdiction over Peoples’s state law claims. This ap-
peal followed.
II. Discussion
We review a district court’s grant of summary judgment
de novo and construe the facts in the light most favorable to
the non-moving party—here, Peoples. O'Brien v. Caterpillar
Inc., 900 F.3d 923, 928 (7th Cir. 2018); Miller v. Chicago Transit
Auth., 20 F.4th 1148, 1155 (7th Cir. 2021).
On appeal, Peoples asserts three arguments. First, the dis-
trict court erred in ruling that the Fourth Amendment is inap-
plicable to his overdetention claim. Second, and alternatively,
the district court erred in ruling the Fourteenth Amendment
is inapplicable to Peoples’s overdetention claim. Third, and
finally, even if the Eighth Amendment is the applicable con-
stitutional provision, the district court erred in finding that
Peoples failed to present a triable Eighth Amendment claim.
We begin by determining the applicable constitutional frame-
work, and then analyze Peoples’s claim under that frame-
work.

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No. 23-1454 7
A. Applicability of the Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth
Amendments
Plaintiffs can sue a municipality under 42 U.S.C. §1983
when the municipality’s actions violate the United States
Constitution and stem from “(1) an official policy adopted
and promulgated by its officers; (2) a governmental practice
or custom that, although not officially authorized, is wide-
spread and well settled; or (3) an official with final policy-
making authority.” Thomas v. Cook County Sheriff's Dep't, 604
F.3d 293, 303 (7th Cir. 2010); see generally Monell v. Dep’t of Soc.
Servs. of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (1978). Absent a constitutional
injury, there is no municipal liability under Monell. Swanigan
v. City of Chicago, 775 F.3d 953, 962 (7th Cir. 2015) (Monell lia-
bility impossible when there is no constitutional violation);
King ex rel. King v. E. St. Louis Sch. Dist. 189, 496 F.3d 812, 817
(7th Cir. 2007) (“[T]here can be no municipal liability based
on an official policy under Monell if the policy did not result
in a violation of [the plaintiff’s] constitutional rights.”). So we
must start by identifying the source of any constitutional in-
jury Peoples may have suffered.
The three possible options are the Fourth, Eighth, and
Fourteenth Amendments, which we tackle in that order. Peo-
ples’s principal argument is that the Fourth Amendment ap-
plies, so we look there first. We identify no Fourth Amend-
ment right implicated by these circumstances. Instead, the
Eighth Amendment governs Peoples’s overdetention claim.
We then reject Peoples’s alternative argument that the Four-
teenth Amendment should apply.

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8 No. 23-1454
1. Fourth Amendment
The Fourth Amendment guarantees “[t]he right of the
people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and ef-
fects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” U.S.
Const. amend. IV. In line with that text, “the ultimate touch-
stone of the Fourth Amendment is ‘reasonableness.’” Brigham
City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398, 403 (2006). A person is seized when
officials “restrain[] his freedom of movement” such that he is
“not free to leave.” Brendlin v. California, 551 U.S. 249, 254–55
(2007). There is no doubt that the Fourth Amendment applies
to pretrial detention. Lewis v. City of Chicago, 914 F.3d 472, 474–
75 (7th Cir. 2019). But Peoples challenges his detention after a
guilty plea and conviction, not his pretrial detention.
In ruling that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable in
this case, the district court relied on a footnote in Manuel v.
City of Joliet, 580 U.S. 357, 369 n.8 (2017). There, the Supreme
Court explained that “once a trial has occurred, the Fourth
Amendment drops out: A person challenging the sufficiency
of the evidence to support both a conviction and any ensuing
incarceration does so under the Due Process Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment.” Id. The Supreme Court elaborated
that “the Framers ‘drafted the Fourth Amendment’ to address
‘the matter of pretrial deprivations of liberty,’ and the Amend-
ment thus provides ’standards and procedures’ for the ‘de-
tention of suspects pending trial.’” Id. (citing Albright v. Oliver,
510 U.S. 266, 274 (1994) and Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. 103, 125
n.27 (1975)) (emphasis in original).
The Supreme Court’s assertion in Manuel that the Fourth
Amendment “drops out” after conviction came in response to
the dissent’s concerns about what framework the majority
would apply to post-trial challenges to the basis of a

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No. 23-1454 9
conviction. Manuel, 580 U.S. at 369 n.8, 382 n.3. In a previous
look at this language in Manuel, we advised that the “Su-
preme Court has never announced nor implied that convic-
tion destroys the entirety of a prisoner’s Fourth Amendment
rights.” Henry v. Hulett, 969 F.3d 769, 780 n.1 (7th Cir. 2020)
(en banc). We then held that the “Fourth Amendment right to
bodily privacy … does not extinguish upon conviction” and
continues “within the walls of a prison.” Id. at 788. Still, the
fact that some Fourth Amendment rights persist after convic-
tion, such as a right to bodily privacy against unreasonable
searches, does not mean that Peoples retained a Fourth
Amendment right against overdetention.
Indeed, we ultimately agree with the district court that
Peoples cannot make out a Fourth Amendment claim. Peoples
knew when he pleaded guilty that he would be subject to ad-
ditional procedures before he would be released. The court’s
commitment order did not allow him to leave the courthouse
of his own accord. And Peoples was already in the custody of
the Sheriff, through electronic monitoring, when he entered
the courthouse. So, although his detention at the Cook County
Jail was longer than he anticipated, we cannot identify a sei-
zure implicating the Fourth Amendment.
Peoples also argues that this court’s post-Manuel decision
in Driver v. Marion County Sheriff demonstrates that the dis-
trict court erred. 859 F.3d 489 (7th Cir. 2017). Driver dealt with
an interlocutory appeal of the lower court’s denial of class cer-
tification for two subclasses who alleged that the Marion
County sheriff detained them at the county jail awaiting re-
lease for an unreasonably long period of time in violation of
the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 490. Most relevantly, those sub-
classes included individuals who were convicted but who

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10 No. 23-1454
had completed the jail time portion of their sentences. Id. at
491. We held that the district court mistakenly believed that
“it was not allowed to engage in an analysis of the merits,”
and we vacated and remanded with instruction to consider
all issues related to the Rule 23 factors for class certification
“even if they overlap with the merits.” Id. at 495; see Wal-Mart
Stores, Inc. v. Duke, 564 U.S. 338, 351–52 (2011) (recognizing
the “necessity of touching aspects of the merits in order to re-
solve preliminary matters” as a “familiar feature of litiga-
tion”).
While the Driver opinion discussed the merits in passing,
our analysis was anchored to the Rule 23 factors required for
class certification and not the plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment
claims. 859 F.3d at 491–95. What’s more, at summary judg-
ment after remand, the district court applied the Fourteenth
Amendment, not the Fourth Amendment, to persons in the
class who “had completed a sentence.” Driver v. Marion
County, No. 1:14-cv-02076-RLY-MJD, Doc. 408 at 20, MSJ Or-
der (S.D. Ind. June 3, 2020). In other words, Driver did not pro-
vide a robust analysis on the merits about how the Fourth
Amendment would apply to post-conviction detentions, let
alone to detention pending transfer to IDOC.
Peoples seeks further support for his view of Driver
through reference to Williams v. Dart, but we see things differ-
ently. 967 F.3d 625, 635 (7th Cir. 2020). In Williams, we ex-
plained that Driver addressed a “proposed class of Fourth
Amendment plaintiffs ‘composed of persons for whom legal
authority for detention has ceased, whether by acquittal after
trial, release on recognizance bond, completion of jail time in
the sentence, or otherwise.’” Id. (quoting Driver, 859 F.3d at
491). We described Driver as saying that “[a]s to that class,

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No. 23-1454 11
further detention was lawful for only such time as reasonably
needed to merely process the release.” Id. (quotation marks
omitted). Setting aside whether Driver made such a conclu-
sion on the merits, that proposed class is still factually distinct
because it did not include persons who required transfer to
IDOC custody. Unlike when a person is in custody after his
jail sentence has expired, the Cook County Sheriff’s “legal au-
thority” to detain Peoples did not cease until transfer to
IDOC. Driver, 859 F.3d at 491. Because of IDOC’s statutory
role in calculating sentence credit and preparing Peoples for
supervised release—another form of custody—his situation is
not analogous to persons held in jail beyond the time when
they should be free to go.
In conclusion, the Fourth Amendment does not apply to
Peoples’s overdetention claim. Consequently, we need not
address whether his pre-transfer detention was a “reasona-
ble” seizure. See United States. v. Montoya de Hernandez, 473
U.S. 531, 537 (1985).
2. Eighth Amendment
While the Fourth Amendment is not applicable here, we
have repeatedly recognized “incarceration beyond the date
when a person is entitled to be released” as an Eighth Amend-
ment violation. Figgs v. Dawson, 829 F.3d 895, 902 (7th Cir.
2016); see also Burke v. Johnston, 452 F.3d 665, 669 (7th Cir. 2006)
(“[W]e agree that incarceration after the time specified in a
sentence has expired violates the Eighth Amendment if it is
the product of deliberate indifference.”). Put another way, a
person may not be held “beyond the term of his incarceration
without penological justification.” Armato v. Grounds, 766 F.3d
713, 721 (7th Cir. 2014).

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12 No. 23-1454
To be sure, while the commitment order kept Peoples in
the Sheriff’s hands until he reached IDOC, Peoples’s sentence
of incarceration had in fact elapsed immediately after sentenc-
ing. IDOC released Peoples the same day they received him.
IDOC’s duty to verify that Peoples’s term of incarceration was
over and process him onto supervised release might have pro-
vided a good reason for the Sheriff to hold Peoples, but the
time to complete those steps did not change the length of his
sentence. Thus, Peoples’s detention beyond February 15 calls
for an Eighth Amendment inquiry.
3. Fourteenth Amendment
Before moving on to our Eighth Amendment analysis, we
must also explain why we reject Peoples’s alternative argu-
ment that if the Fourth Amendment does not apply, then we
should analyze his claim under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Peoples cites several other courts that have identified a pro-
tected liberty interest and substantive due process right
against overdetention in the Fourteenth Amendment. See, e.g.,
Hicks v. LeBlanc, 832 Fed. App’x. 836, 840 (5th Cir. 2020); Scott
v. Baldwin, 720 F.3d 1034, 1036 (8th Cir. 2013). But the Supreme
Court has advised that “[w]here a particular amendment pro-
vides an explicit textual source of constitutional protection
against a particular sort of government behavior, that
Amendment, not the more generalized notion of substantive
due process, must be the guide for analyzing these claims.”
County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 842 (1998) (quoting
Albright, 510 U.S. at 273 (plurality opinion) (incorporation
“has substituted, in these areas of criminal procedure, the spe-
cific guarantees of the various provisions of the Bill of Rights
… for the more generalized language” of the Due Process
Clause)); id. at 288 (Souter, J., concurring in the judgment)

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No. 23-1454 13
(“the Court has resisted relying on the Due Process Clause
when doing so would have duplicated protection that a more
specific constitutional provision already bestowed”).
Because our case law recognizes an Eighth Amendment
right against overdetention, we decline in this instance to
identify a duplicative right in the Fourteenth Amendment. See
Figgs, 829 F.3d at 902 (acknowledging such an Eighth Amend-
ment right); Armato, 766 F.3d at 721 (same); Burke, 452 F.3d at
669 (same). Doing so would be either redundant with, or
worse, disruptive to our Eighth Amendment analysis. As we
understand it, Peoples asks us to conclude not only that the
Fourteenth Amendment applies to his claim but also that the
inquiry should essentially mirror a Fourth Amendment rea-
sonableness test. Considering that the Eighth Amendment
test sets a higher bar for plaintiffs, his Eighth Amendment
overdetention claim would then collapse into a Fourteenth
Amendment claim. That runs counter to the Supreme Court’s
guidance and the approach we have followed in similar cases.
B. Eighth Amendment Analysis
With those threshold questions resolved, we may now
look at the merits of Peoples’s claim. He contends that even
under an Eighth Amendment inquiry, the district court was
wrong to conclude that he failed to present a triable claim. We
disagree.
Under the Eighth Amendment, prison officials “may not
act with deliberate indifference toward a known risk that a
prisoner is being held beyond his term of incarceration with-
out penological justification.” Whitfield v. Spiller, 76 F.4th 698,
714 (7th Cir. 2023). “Deliberate indifference requires more
than negligence or even gross negligence; a plaintiff must

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14 No. 23-1454
show that the defendant was essentially criminally reckless,
that is, ignored a known risk.” Figgs, 829 F.3d at 903; see also
Armato, 766 F.3d at 721. When there is a known risk, a state
officer is deliberately indifferent “when he does nothing,”
Figgs, 829 F.3d at 903, or when he takes action that is so inef-
fectual under the circumstances that deliberate indifference
can be inferred, Burke, 452 F.3d at 669.
Defendants who pleaded guilty to felonies on certain days
of the week were held at the Cook County Jail for several
nights before they could be transported to IDOC. A guilty
plea on any Friday of the year, for instance, would lead to at
least three more nights at the Jail. That was true even for turn-
arounds, who had received sentences that would lead to their
release as soon as they completed IDOC processing. So while
Peoples’s claim is framed around the unfortunate timing of
his plea on the day before Presidents’ Day weekend, which
resulted in four nights of detention, a similar issue would
have occurred with regularity. It can be fairly said that there
was a “known risk” that Peoples would be detained beyond
the end of his sentence. Whitfield, 76 F.4th at 714.
The Sheriff’s penological justification for these detentions
after sentencing is that they were necessary to comply with
IDOC’s transfer policy. We have recognized in the context of
other overdetention claims that “[r]easonable time must be al-
lowed for such matters as transportation, identity verifica-
tion, and processing.” Lewis v. O’Grady, 853 F.2d 1366, 1370
(7th Cir. 1988).1 It seems that any of these logistical issues
alone would not explain the duration of the delay here.
1 Lewis, 853 F.2d at 1369, applied the Fourth Amendment to a claim for
delayed release by an individual who was not convicted of a crime.

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No. 23-1454 15
Transportation would be a matter of hours, and IDOC’s pro-
cessing time appears to be quick: for Peoples, it was com-
pleted the same day he arrived. The record does not contain a
justification for IDOC’s transfer policy, although we could im-
agine that IDOC chooses not to accept transfers on certain
days because of limited resources or to avoid backlogs. In any
event, regardless of IDOC’s reasons for the transfer policy,
IDOC is not a defendant in this case. Our inquiry looks only
at the Sheriff’s penological justification for holding Peoples.
To that point, the Sheriff detained Peoples for four days be-
cause IDOC would not accept him any sooner.
In light of Illinois law, IDOC policy, and the court’s orders,
that justification is enough for the Sheriff to prevail. Beyond
IDOC’s exclusive duty to calculate sentences, IDOC’s pro-
cessing—which includes taking DNA and a photograph, per-
forming a medical check, looking for warrants, and finding a
host site for supervision—is important for a successful super-
vised release. Peoples could not go free from detention until
IDOC completed its statutory obligations, which is why the
commitment order commanded the Sheriff to “take [Peoples]
into custody and deliver him[] to [IDOC].” The Sheriff
brought Peoples to IDOC on the first day that IDOC would
accept him. As we have said, “there is no basis for an award
of damages against executive officials whose policy is to carry
out the judge’s orders.” Hernandez v. Sheahan, 455 F.3d 772,
778 (7th Cir. 2006).
All that being so, Peoples still says that the Sheriff did not
have to detain him at the Cook County Jail to follow the com-
mitment order. He contends that the Sheriff’s 2020 response
to the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the Sheriff should

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16 No. 23-1454
have released him in 2019 while he awaited transfer to the
IDOC. This argument is unpersuasive.
For a period during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sheriff
allowed some turnarounds to return home on electronic mon-
itoring after sentencing, and then picked them up for direct
transfer to IDOC for processing the next business day. There
is factual uncertainty as to whether the Sheriff had discretion
to take these measures without further court order. The Sher-
iff argues that any such release was pursuant to explicit order
from a judge, but the record shows that the Cook County Cir-
cuit Court used the same sentencing form both when Peoples
was sentenced and during the pandemic. Although that form
ordered the Sheriff to take a sentenced person into “custody,”
Peoples was in custody when he was on electronic monitoring
pre-plea. Likewise, the Sheriff also says that a judge had to
order electronic monitoring before individuals were sent
home pending IDOC processing, but Peoples was already be-
ing monitored when he was sentenced.
We need not wade any deeper into those factual questions.
To start, any temporary procedures that Peoples points to
were implemented in response to a global health emergency
and do not control our view of the policies governing Peo-
ples’s release in 2019. More generally, courts should not mi-
cromanage correctional facilities: we “must accord substantial
deference to the professional judgment of [correctional] ad-
ministrators, who bear a significant responsibility for defin-
ing the legitimate goals of a corrections system and for deter-
mining the most appropriate means to accomplish them.”
Overton v. Bazzetta, 539 U.S. 126, 132 (2003). During the peak
of the pandemic, we reiterated that “[c]orrectional adminis-
trators must have ‘substantial discretion to devise reasonable

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No. 23-1454 17
solutions to the problems they face,’ particularly when safety
and security interests are at stake.” Mays v. Dart, 974 F.3d 810,
820–21 (7th Cir. 2020) (quoting Florence v. Bd. of Chosen Free-
holders, 566 U.S. 318, 326 (2012)).
So even if we were to take the disputed facts fully in Peo-
ples’s favor, policy changes adopted in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic do not reach back in time to establish
that the Sheriff acted with deliberate indifference in 2019.
Adopting a policy of release on electronic monitoring before
transfer to IDOC might have prevented Peoples and other in-
dividuals from spending additional nights at the Jail, but
“[t]he existence or possibility of other better policies which
might have been used does not necessarily mean that the de-
fendant was being deliberatively indifferent.” Frake v. City of
Chicago, 210 F.3d 779, 782 (7th Cir. 2000). Measures imple-
mented during the pandemic may not have been desirable or
feasible policy in 2019. See, e.g., Mays, 974 F.3d at 814 (“The
inherent nature of the [Cook County] Jail presents unique
challenges for combatting the spread of COVID-19: it is de-
signed to accommodate large and densely-packed popula-
tions.”).
At trial, Peoples would have to show that the Sheriff’s de-
cision to hold turnarounds in a central location was not a jus-
tified penological response to IDOC’s transfer hours. If he
made that showing, the stringent deliberate indifference
standard would still prevent recovery unless Peoples could
establish that the Sheriff was essentially criminally reckless in
his policy choice. Peoples has not presented a record that in-
dicates he could meet either of these burdens. At most, Peo-
ples puts forward possible reforms to deal with IDOC policy,
such as the Sheriff asking the courts to order temporary

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18 No. 23-1454
release pending transfer or to schedule plea hearings on dif-
ferent days. The proactive efforts he envisions are far afield
from the requirements of the Eighth Amendment.
Lastly, Peoples contends that if the Sheriff could not have
released him, he should have placed him and other turna-
rounds in a separate portion of the Cook County Jail rather
than with the general population. As described above, we
hesitate to intervene in this type of administrative affair. Peo-
ples would need to show that the Sheriff was deliberately in-
different to his substantial risk of harm. See Farmer v. Brennan,
511 U.S. 825, 832, 839–40 (1994). Beyond general statements
that he perceived the Cook County Jail as a violent place, Peo-
ples has not presented evidence that he was in danger there,
so this aspect of his claim also fails. See id. at 834.
III. Conclusion
In summary, the district court was correct that the Eighth
Amendment governs Peoples’s overdetention claim, and that
Peoples could not establish the Sheriff violated the Eighth
Amendment. Without a constitutional injury, Peoples’s Sec-
tion 1983 claim fails. The judgment of the district court is
AFFIRMED.

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