Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca8-06-01672/USCOURTS-ca8-06-01672-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT

___________

No. 06-1672

___________

Alfred Flowers, *

*

Plaintiff/Appellee, *

*

v. *

*

City of Minneapolis, Minnesota, * 

* Appeal from the United States

Defendant, * District Court for the 

* District of Minnesota. 

Kevin Stoll, in his individual and *

official capacities, *

*

Defendant/Appellant, *

*

Sherry Appledorn, in her individual *

and official capacities, *

Erika Christensen, in her individual *

and official capacities, John Does 1-5, *

*

Defendants. * 

___________

Submitted: October 19, 2006

Filed: March 1, 2007

___________

Before SMITH, BOWMAN, and COLLOTON, Circuit Judges.

___________

COLLOTON, Circuit Judge.

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Minnesota police officer Kevin Stoll appeals the district court’s denial of his

motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity. Alfred Flowers sued

Stoll under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging violations of several constitutional rights. The

district court dismissed a number of claims, but concluded that Stoll was not entitled

to qualified immunity with respect to Flowers’s allegations that Stoll violated his

substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. We conclude that

the substantive due process claims should have been dismissed, and we therefore

reverse.

I.

 Flowers is an African-American resident of Minneapolis, and Stoll is a

lieutenant in the Minneapolis Police Department. In the summer of 2003, Flowers

began renting a home on Knox Avenue South in Minneapolis, on the same block

where Stoll lived. Neither knew of the other’s identity on the block until the summer

of 2004, although Stoll was aware that Flowers had a previous encounter with the

police department. In September 2003, Flowers was arrested for disorderly conduct

and resisting arrest, and later that year, Stoll accessed a computerized report

concerning the Flowers arrest. In September 2004, after the events at issue in this

lawsuit, Flowers was acquitted of the charges. 

 On August 1, 2004, Stoll noticed graffiti on two garages in the neighborhood

near the home rented by Flowers. This occurred in an area where graffiti was

uncommon. Stoll spoke with the police gang expert about the incident. He explained

that the graffiti appeared after the Flowers family moved into the neighborhood, and

he raised a concern about whether gang activity might be associated with the Flowers

residence. After observing the graffiti, an investigator told Stoll that she thought it

was gang-related, and that she believed a woman suspected to be a gang member lived

at the Flowers residence. She also sent Stoll a packet of information on Flowers. The

police gang unit, however, made no further investigation into the matter.

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1

In an affidavit, Flowers also stated that he “learned from a police officer that

police had put out a ‘hit’ on [him],” (App. at 58), and his sister, a former Minneapolis

police officer, averred that she was told by an unnamed police officer that “some

Minneapolis Police had put out a ‘hit’ on [her] brother.” (App. at 53). Neither

witness attributed this alleged threat to Stoll, and presumably because the statements

constituted inadmissible hearsay, the district court did not mention them. See Sallis

-3-

On his own initiative, Stoll contacted the patrol supervisor for his neighborhood

and requested a “directed patrol” of the Flowers residence. In a directed patrol,

officers are instructed to patrol the area of the target address as time permits. On the

same day, during a period when Stoll was the highest ranking officer on duty, he

attended roll call at the precinct with jurisdiction over the Flowers residence. There,

he distributed information about Flowers to the patrol officers, informed them about

the graffiti near his house, and offered a steak dinner for any officer who made an

arrest that led to the conviction or eviction of anyone living at the Flowers residence.

There is conflicting evidence in the record as to whether Stoll’s actions were contrary

to official procedures. (App. at 348, 430, 458). 

As a result of Stoll’s request, officers began to conduct heavy patrol on Knox

Avenue. Department records show that officers checked the Flowers residence six

times on directed patrol in August, for a total of sixty-nine minutes. Flowers testified

that passing cruisers shined their lights into his home and frightened his family. He

stated that a window at his home was broken during this period, shortly after a police

squad car was seen driving by the house. Flowers averred that he and his family left

the house to stay at another location for a weekend at the end of August. He also

presented a letter from a woman whose son was enrolled in Flowers’s childcare

facility, but withdrew in 2004 “due to allegations regarding the owner,” and then reenrolled in 2005 after the woman “found out that the allegations were not true.” (App.

at 542). She did not specify whether the “allegations” arose from the criminal charges

of which Flowers was acquitted in 2004, or the investigation of possible gang activity

initiated by Stoll.1

 The directed patrol ended in late August, around the time Flowers

Appellate Case: 06-1672 Page: 3 Date Filed: 03/01/2007 Entry ID: 3283505
v. Univ. of Minnesota, 408 F.3d 470, 474 (8th Cir. 2005) (explaining that non-movant

must come forward with admissible evidence to defeat summary judgment).

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filed a lawsuit against the Minneapolis Police Department and several officers,

including Stoll, based on this series of events.

In his complaint, Flowers alleged federal claims under 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and

1983 and state law claims of defamation and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

The district court dismissed the claims against all defendants but Stoll, and dismissed

all claims against Stoll except for the constitutional claims based on substantive due

process.

II.

To decide whether Stoll is entitled to qualified immunity, we first consider

whether the facts alleged, taken in the light most favorable to Flowers, show that

Stoll’s conduct violated a constitutional right. Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 201

(2001). If so, then we determine whether the constitutional right was clearly

established at the time. Id.

The claims at issue on this appeal are based on the substantive component of

the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Due Process Clause

provides the familiar guarantee of fair procedures, prohibiting the deprivation of life,

liberty, or property by a State without due process of law. In addition, under the

rubric of substantive due process, it “protects individual liberty against ‘certain

government actions regardless of the fairness of the procedures used to implement

them.’” Collins v. City of Harker Heights, 503 U.S. 115, 125 (1992) (quoting Daniels

v. Williams, 474 U.S. 327, 331 (1986)). 

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To establish a violation of substantive due process rights by an executive

official, a plaintiff must show (1) that the official violated one or more fundamental

constitutional rights, and (2) that the conduct of the executive official was shocking

to the “contemporary conscience.” County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 847

n.8 (1998); Terrell v. Larson, 396 F.3d 975, 978 n. 1 (8th Cir. 2005) (en banc). In

denying Stoll’s motion for summary judgment, the district court reasoned that “Stoll’s

actions were sufficiently conscience shocking to impose liability,” and that qualified

immunity was not available, because “a jury could conclude that a reasonable officer

in Stoll’s position would have deemed his actions to violate Flowers’s substantive due

process rights.” The district court concluded that Flowers had not established an

“actual deprivation of a life, liberty, or property right” for purposes of his procedural

due process claim, but the court did not discuss what alleged fundamental right was

at stake in the substantive due process analysis.

We conclude that Stoll is entitled to summary judgment on the substantive due

process claim because whatever effect his actions may have on the contemporary

conscience, the evidence does not show that Stoll deprived Flowers of a fundamental

right protected by the Due Process Clause. For purposes of substantive due process

analysis, fundamental rights are those “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and

tradition, and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor

justice would exist if they were sacrificed.” Terrell, 396 F.3d at 978 n.1 (quotation

omitted). To discern “guideposts for responsible decisionmaking” in this area, we

look to “[o]ur Nation’s history, legal traditions, and practices.” Washington v.

Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997) (quoting Collins, 503 U.S. at 125). 

In urging us to affirm the district court’s ruling on substantive due process,

Flowers suggests that a number of asserted fundamental rights are at issue in this case,

and we consider the principal contentions in turn. First, Flowers claims that Stoll’s

conduct threatened his fundamental right to “personal safety.” For an explication of

this asserted right, Flowers directs us to Wood v. Ostrander, 879 F.2d 583 (9th Cir.

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1989), which discussed a liberty interest in “physical security” in a case involving a

sexual assault, id. at 589, and relied in turn on Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651, 674-

75 (1977), a procedural due process case that analyzed a child’s liberty interest in

avoiding excessive corporal punishment in public school. Assuming for the sake of

argument that the liberty interest discussed in Ingraham can be transported into

substantive due process analysis, the facts alleged by Flowers do not approach the

situations in Wood or Ingraham. There is no allegation of physical injury to Flowers

or his family, and he has developed no substantial argument that surveillance of a

home or the unwarranted direction of suspicion toward a household deprives the

occupants of an unenumerated constitutional right to “personal safety” recognized by

our Nation’s history and traditions.

Flowers also alleges a violation of his liberty interest to engage in “the common

occupations of life.” See Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923). This liberty

interest was first described in connection with a statute that prohibited the teaching of

school in any language other than English. Id. at 399-400. The Court since has

defined it as applying to the “complete prohibition of the right to engage in a calling,”

Conn v. Gabbert, 526 U.S. 286, 291-92 (1999), and it may also extend to a suspension

without pay and demotion in public employment, at least where the adverse action is

undertaken based on race. Moran v. Clarke, 296 F.3d 638, 645 (8th Cir. 2002) (en

banc). But whatever its scope, this asserted fundamental right clearly does not

encompass a “brief interruption” of work in a desired occupation. Conn, 526 U.S. at

292; see Singleton v. Cecil, 176 F.3d 419, 426 n.8 (8th Cir. 1999) (en banc). Flowers

complains, at most, of a temporary slowdown in his childcare business, evidenced by

an inconclusive letter from one customer. The alleged injury, therefore, does not rise

to the level of a deprivation of the fundamental right to engage in one’s chosen

occupation. 

Flowers next asserts that Stoll interfered with the fundamental “right of families

to live together,” citing the plurality opinion in Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431

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U.S. 494 (1977). Moore held unconstitutional a zoning ordinance that defined

“family” in such a way as to prohibit a grandmother and her two grandsons from

living together in an area designated for “single family” dwellings. See Doe v. Miller,

405 F.3d 700, 710 (8th Cir. 2005). The Moore plurality’s reasoning is inapposite

here. Stoll’s actions did not operate directly on the family relationship, and while the

patrol activity was disturbing to the Flowers household and frightening to the children,

it did not force the family members to live apart or otherwise amount to “intrusive

regulation” of “family living arrangements.” Moore, 431 U.S. at 499 (plurality

opinion). Flowers also invokes the individual rights “to direct the upbringing and

education of one’s children,” “to marry and have children,” and “to marital privacy.”

But the Supreme Court’s decisions concerning the rearing of children and the use of

contraception are far afield from this situation, e.g., Pierce v. Society of the Sisters,

268 U.S. 510, 534-35 (1925); Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 485-86 (1965),

and they do not support Flowers’s claim.

Flowers contends, finally, that Stoll acted affirmatively to place Flowers in a

position of danger that he would not otherwise have faced, and that this action creates

a constitutional duty of care on the part of the officer under the Due Process Clause.

See S.S. v. McMullen, 225 F.3d 960, 962 (8th Cir. 2000) (en banc); Gregory v. City

of Rogers, 974 F.2d 1006, 1010 (8th Cir. 1992). This “state-created danger” doctrine

has been applied, for example, where a state trooper knowingly left the female

passenger of an arrested driver stranded in a high-crime area, where she was later

raped, Wood, 879 F.2d at 589-90, and where police officers stranded young children

on a Chicago expressway during inclement weather. White v. Rockford, 592 F.2d 381,

382-84 (7th Cir. 1979). The evidence in this case, however, is insufficient to show

that Stoll placed Flowers in a position of substantial danger from which he was unable

to protect himself. Viewed in the light most favorable to Flowers, the directed patrols

and requests for investigation may constitute harassment, but they did not put the

Flowers family in danger of an armed police raid or other assaultive conduct.

Evidence that a window was broken at the Flowers home is too insubstantial to

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establish that Stoll created a “danger of significant harm” to the family that did not

previously exist. McMullen, 225 F.3d at 962. The record is thus insufficient to meet

the first element of a substantive due process claim based on the State’s affirmative

creation of danger to a citizen.

Flowers’s asserted injuries were a month of living with police patrols and

spotlighting of his house, a broken window that occurred in close proximity to a

police patrol, a short-term loss of some business at his childcare facility due to

“allegations about the owner,” and a temporary stay at another location for a weekend.

These harms are not de minimis, but even assuming they all could be attributed to

Stoll, the scope of substantive due process is carefully circumscribed, and the

evidence presented here falls short of establishing the deprivation of a fundamental

right or liberty interest as is required to support a constitutional claim under that

theory.

* * *

For the foregoing reasons, we reverse the district court’s decision denying in

part Stoll’s motion for summary judgment, and we remand the case for further

proceedings consistent with this opinion.

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