Opinion ID: 4567680
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Origin of the State-Created Danger Theory of

Text: Liability The state-created danger doctrine traces to a few words in the Supreme Court’s opinion in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989). Like the case here, the facts were disturbing. County officials allegedly learned of a father’s penchant for beating his son Joshua. Id. at 192–93. Rather than protect the defenseless child, the officials elected against intervening, and the dad’s final attack caused “brain damage so severe that [the boy was] expected to spend the rest of his life confined to an institution.” Id. at 193. Joshua and his mother then sued, alleging, novelly, that the officials’ failure to intervene violated the boy’s constitutional rights. Id. The Supreme Court rejected the claim. Such rights appear nowhere in the text of the Constitution, of course, and “the Due Process Clause[] generally confer[s] no affirmative right to governmental aid, even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests of which the government itself may not deprive the individual.” Id. at 196. Rather, only “in certain limited circumstances” does “the Constitution impose[] upon the State affirmative duties of care and protection with respect to particular individuals,” such as 6 prisoners and the “involuntarily committed.” Id. at 198–99. In those cases, the State has taken an “affirmative act of restraining the individual’s freedom to act on his own behalf,” and that could be a “‘deprivation of liberty’ triggering the protections of the Due Process Clause.” Id. at 200. But there was not that kind of “special relationship” between the county and the young boy. Id. at 197, 201. Further, while the county “may have been aware of the dangers that Joshua faced in the free world, it played no part in their creation, nor did it do anything to render him any more vulnerable to them.” Id. at 201. From those simple words—“played no part in their creation” and “render him any more vulnerable”—sprang a considerable expansion of the law. While seemingly not part of DeShaney’s holding, lower courts seized on those words to create a new remedy that would, it was thought, aid the next “[p]oor Joshua.” 3 Thus was born the “state-created danger” 3 DeShaney v. Winnebago Cty. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 489 U.S. 189, 213 (1989) (Blackmun, J., dissenting). In his oftrepeated dissenting opinion, Justice Blackmun urged a “‘sympathetic’ reading” of the Constitution, “one which comports with dictates of fundamental justice.” Id. As the majority noted, victims like Joshua do deserve both sympathy and action, and “[t]he people of Wisconsin may well prefer a system of liability which would place upon the State and its officials the responsibility for failure to act in situations such as the present one.” Id. at 203. But the Constitution does not permit the courts to “thrust” that remedy upon them by an “expansion of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” outside its ordinary meaning. Id. That is because 7 theory of liability, which we adopted in Kneipp v. Tedder, 95 F.3d 1199, 1205 (3d Cir. 1996).4 There, a severely intoxicated husband and wife were walking home from a bar. Id. at 1201. Police officers stopped the couple, separated them, and allowed the man to continue on his way. Id. at 1201–02. The officers later “sent [the woman] home alone,” but she never made it; she was “found unconscious at the bottom of an embankment” the next day. Id. at 1202–03. The woman’s parents then sued, asserting that the officers had violated their daughter’s substantive due process rights. Id. at 1203. But there was no “special relationship” between the state and the decedent falling within DeShaney’s narrow holding. Id. at 1205. Charting a new course, we elevated the commentary in DeShaney and discovered that the Court had “left open the possibility that a constitutional violation might . . . occur[]” when a state “play[s a] part in . . . creat[ing]” a danger or when it “render[s a person] more vulnerable to” that danger. Id. at 1205 (quoting DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 201). Since the police separated the couple, “then sen[t the woman] home unescorted in a seriously intoxicated state in cold weather,” the state, through its actors, “made [her] more vulnerable to harm.” Id. “the Constitution is a written instrument” and “its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted, it means now.” Brown v. Ent. Merch. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 822 (2011) (Thomas, J., dissenting) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). Rather, our Constitution reserves the virtue of sympathy to the people. 4 Earlier cases “considered the possible viability” of the theory. Kneipp v. Tedder, 95 F.3d 1199, 1205 (3d Cir. 1996) (collecting cases). 8 at 1209. The danger, we explained, was not the plaintiff’s intoxicated journey from tavern to domicile. Id. Rather, it was the “state-created danger” of removing her male companion, who presumably would have sheltered her from peril, that violated the guarantee of due process framed in the Fourteenth Amendment. 5 Id. at 1211.