By 5–4 vote, Supreme Court stays Orange County jail to implement certain COVID safety measures

This evening the Supreme Court, voting 5-4 along the "usual" lines, issued a stay to block an order requiring a local jail in California to implement certain safety measures to provide greater COVID protection to inmates.  The majority's order is just a paragraph and includes no reasoning, but Justice Sotomayor's eight-page dissent has a lot to say.  Here is how it starts and ends:

Today, this Court steps in to stay a preliminary injunction requiring Sheriff Don Barnes and Orange County (collectively, the Orange County Jail, or Jail) to implement certain safety measures to protect their inmates during the unprecedented COVID–19 pandemic.  The injunction’s requirements are not remarkable.  In fact, the Jail initially claimed that it had already implemented each and every one of them.  Yet, apparently disregarding the District Court’s detailed factual findings, its application of established law, and the fact that the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has twice denied a stay pending its review of the District Court’s order, this Court again intervenes to grant a stay before the Circuit below has heard and decided the case on the merits....  The Jail’s application does not warrant such extraordinary intervention.  Indeed, this Court stays the District Court’s preliminary injunction even though the Jail recently reported 15 new cases of COVID– 19 in a single week (even with the injunction in place), even though the Jail misrepresented under oath to the District Court the measures it was taking to combat the virus’ spread, and even though the Jail’s central rationale for a stay (that the injunction goes beyond federal guidelines) ignores the lower courts’ conclusion that the Jail’s measures fell “well short” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Guidelines...

At the time of the injunction, there were nearly 3,000 inmates still in the Jail’s care, 488 of whom were medically vulnerable to COVID–19.  “[H]aving stripped them of virtually every means of self-protection and foreclosed their access to outside aid, the government and its officials” must “‘take reasonable measures to guarantee the[ir] safety.’”  Farmer, 511 U.S., at 832–833; see also Valentine v. Collier, 590 U.S. ___, ___–___ (2020) (statement of SOTOMAYOR, J.) (slip op., at 6–7) (“It has long been said that a society’s worth can be judged by taking stock of its prisons. That is all the truer in this pandemic, where inmates everywhere have been rendered vulnerable and often powerless to protect themselves from harm”).  The District Court found that, despite knowing the severe threat posed by COVID–19 and contrary to its own apparent policies, the Jail exposed its inmates to significant risks from a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease.  Yet this Court now intervenes, leaving to its own devices a jail that has misrepresented its actions to the District Court and failed to safeguard the health of the inmates in its care.  I respectfully dissent.