"Court Will Rule on Town's Liability in Family Violence" is the headline to this story today by Charles Lane in the Washington Post. Some quotes:
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will decide whether victims of domestic violence have a constitutional right to sue local governments that fail to protect them from abusers. Without comment or recorded dissent, the court said it would hear an appeal from a Colorado town accused of refusing to enforce a restraining order against a violent father who eventually killed his three children.Linda Greenhouse of the NY Times also has good coverage of this grant today. Some quotes:The town, Castle Rock, seeks to overturn a federal appeals court ruling that found it liable because it had not given the children's mother adequate notice of its non-enforcement or a chance to plead her case.
Castle Rock, supported by the International Municipal Lawyers Association and the National League of Cities, contends the Supreme Court must overturn that ruling to prevent a "potentially devastating" flood of lawsuits that "could bankrupt municipal governments . . . given the inevitability of less-than-perfect enforcement."
Attorneys for the mother had urged the court to leave the ruling alone, saying that it "reflect[ed] a very fact-specific issue that is unlikely to recur frequently."
The case is a sequel to one of the most emotion-laden cases in recent Supreme Court history, 1989's DeShaney v. Winnebago County, in which the justices ruled, 6 to 3, that a brain-damaged Wisconsin boy, Joshua DeShaney, and his mother could not sue local authorities who knew that the boy was being beaten by his father but did not stop the beatings. * * *
In the case the court agreed to hear yesterday, Castle Rock, Colo. v. Gonzales, No. 04-278, Jessica Gonzales is suing Castle Rock for allegedly failing to enforce a restraining order that barred her estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, from visiting their three children except at specified times. * * *
Earlier this year, the Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, sitting as a full 11-member panel, ruled that Jessica Gonzales can press a constitutional claim against Castle Rock in federal court.
In a 6 to 5 ruling, the appeals court acknowledged that the Supreme Court's ruling in DeShaney bars any claim based on a right to be protected by local authorities. But the 10th Circuit said the restraining order against her husband gave Jessica Gonzales a strong enough expectation of government protection that she had a due-process right at least to be told in advance if the town was not going to enforce it.
The lower courts have confronted the question numerous times in recent years and have produced conflicting answers. In the case the justices accepted, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, voted 6 to 5 to permit the woman's lawsuit, against the town of Castle Rock, Colo., to proceed to trial. The federal district court in Denver had dismissed the suit, in which the plaintiff, Jessica Gonzales, is seeking $30 million in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages.Check here for links to the lower court opinions in Castle Rock, CO v. Gonzales, Jessica, et al. Posted by Marcia Oddi at November 2, 2004 04:53 AMColorado law makes it mandatory for the police to provide protection once a protective order is issued. "A peace officer shall use every reasonable means to enforce a protection order," the state law provides. In addition, the law requires the police to make an arrest if they have probable cause to believe that such an order has been violated. Many other states have similar laws.
The appeals court's majority reasoned that the law gave Colorado residents a vested right to receive a particular government service, police protection, that cannot be withheld without procedural safeguards intended to prevent the government from acting in an arbitrary way.
The case will require the Supreme Court to revisit a doctrine articulated by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist in a well-known case from 1989, in which a county social services department in Wisconsin was found not to have breached a constitutional duty when it returned a young boy to an abusive father and then failed to monitor his safety. That decision, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, established the rule that the government is not ordinarily obliged to protect people from harm at the hands of their fellow private citizens.
The DeShaney opinion was based on a branch of constitutional analysis known as "substantive due process." The 14th Amendment bars the states from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property" without due process, and the substantive due process question asks whether the challenged government action has violated any of those three guarantees. "Nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors," Chief Justice Rehnquist said in his opinion.
The 14th Amendment also has a procedural component: even if the state has a permissible reason for impinging on the amendment's substantive protections, it must use due process proper procedures in doing so. In the DeShaney case, Chief Justice Rehnquist said the question of whether the county had used proper procedures in its care for the child had not been properly presented to the court. Consequently, the ruling has been interpreted by some lower courts as not foreclosing a procedural ruling in a future case.
That was the approach the 10th Circuit took in the new case, Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, No. 04-278. The majority said Ms. Gonzales had presented a plausible case that the police had failed to follow proper procedure in disregarding her repeated requests for help after her husband had kidnapped the three girls - ages 7, 9 and 10 - from the yard of their house on the afternoon of June 22, 1999.