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Page Number: 41

14 

CASTLE ROCK v. GONZALES 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

suggests  that  the  fact  that  “enforcement”  may  encompass 
different acts infects any entitlement to enforcement with 
“indeterminacy.”  Ante,  at  14.  But  this  objection  is  also 
unfounded.  Our cases have never required the object of an 
entitlement  to  be  some  mechanistic,  unitary  thing.    Sup-
pose  a  State  entitled  every  citizen  whose  income  was
under  a  certain  level  to  receive  health  care  at  a  state 
clinic.  The  provision  of  health  care  is  not  a  unitary
thing—doctors and administrators must decide what tests 
are called for and what procedures are required, and these 
decisions  often  involve  difficult  applications  of  judgment. 
But  it  could  not  credibly  be  said  that  a  citizen  lacks  an 
entitlement  to  health  care  simply  because  the  content  of 
that entitlement is not the same in every given situation. 
Similarly,  the  enforcement  of  a  restraining  order  is  not 
some amorphous, indeterminate thing.  Under the statute, 
if  the  police  have  probable  cause  that  a  violation  has 
occurred, enforcement consists of either making an imme-
diate  arrest  or  seeking  a  warrant  and  then  executing  an 
arrest—traditional,  well-defined  tasks  that  law  enforce-
ment officers perform every day.13 

—————— 

deciding  whether  to  execute  that  warrant.    Ante,  at  15.  This  is  an 
unlikely  reading  given  that  the  statute  was  motivated  by  a  profound 
distrust  of  police  discretion  in  the  domestic  violence  context  and  moti-
vated by a desire to improve the protection given to holders of domestic 
restraining  orders.    We  do  not  have  the  benefit  of  an  authoritative 
construction  of  Colorado  law,  but  I  would  think  that  if  an  estranged 
husband harassed his wife in violation of a restraining order, and then 
absconded  after  she  called  the  police,  the  statute  would  not  only  obli-
gate  the  police  to  seek  an  arrest  warrant,  but  also  obligate  them  to 
execute  it  by  making  an  arrest.    In  any  event,  under  respondent’s 
allegations,  by  the  time  the  police  were  informed  of  the  husband’s 
whereabouts,  an  arrest  was  practical  and,  under  the  statute’s  terms, 
mandatory.  

13 The Court wonders “how the mandatory-arrest paradigm applies to 
cases in which the offender is not present to be arrested.”  Ante, at 13. 
Again,  questions  as  to  the  scope  of  the  obligation  to  provide  enforce-
ment  are  far  afield  from  the  key  issue—whether  there  exists  an  enti-