Michael Kingsley was being held in detention in a Monroe County jail in Sparta, Wisconsin in 2010, awaiting trial on drug charges.

[2] Judge Barbara Brandriff Crabb denied the officers' motion for a summary judgment and the case moved to trial.

The Court rejected the respondents' arguments based on the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause as applying only to convicted prisoners, not pretrial detainees.

He wrote that harm inflicted on a pretrial detainee in this manner is not "imposed for the purpose of punishment" and so does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice Alito dissented, stating that the case should have been dismissed as improvidently granted as there remains an unsettled question of whether a "pretrial detainee can bring a Fourth Amendment claim based on the use of excessive force by a detention facility employee.