Opinion ID: 3014824
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The State-Created Danger Claim

Text: beat her with a gun and threatened to murder her for allegedly informing the FBI about the husband’s involvement in a local drug ring. See 128 F.3d at 814–15. The police tracked the men to the husband’s house, at which point they activated the SWAT team. They instructed the men to exit the building, which they did voluntarily. When they emerged, the police ordered them to lie face down in the dirt, screamed obscenities, and threatened them verbally and with weapons. In a subsequent § 1983 action, this Court affirmed a grant of summary judgment for the defendants, finding that the force used was not excessive. See id. at 820–22. We think that there is one clear difference between this case and Sharrar. In Sharrar, the actions of the officers were calculated primarily to frighten the plaintiffs into submission and were likely to lead to, at worst, minor physical injuries. In this case, however, the troopers should have been aware that their actions were likely to cause Smith serious, if not fatal, harm. 17 The Smiths also argue that defendants violated Smith’s Fourteenth Amendment rights under the “state-created danger” doctrine. In order to prevail on a state-created danger claim, a plaintiff must prove (1) the harm ultimately caused was foreseeable and fairly direct; (2) the state actor acted in willful disregard for the safety of the plaintiff; (3) there existed some relationship between the state and the plaintiff; (4) the state actors used their authority to create an opportunity that otherwise would not have existed for the [harm] to occur. Mark v. Borough of Hatboro, 51 F.3d 1137, 1152 (3d Cir. 1995). Smith I held that the second element of this test is only satisfied by conduct that “shocks the conscience.” See 318 F.3d at 507. Although this requirement is but one element of the test, it is often the most difficult for a plaintiff to show, and thus our ultimate conclusion frequently turns on our determination of whether given conduct “shocks the conscience.” For this reason, we will focus our analysis on this element. As we noted in Smith I, the question whether a given action “shocks the conscience” has an “elusive” quality to it. See 318 F.3d at 509; cf. Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390, 428 (1993) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (questioning “the usefulness of ‘conscience shocking’ as a legal test”). As the Supreme Court has observed: Whether the point of the conscience-shocking is reached when injuries are produced with culpability falling within the middle range, following from something more than negligence but “less than intentional conduct, such as recklessness or ‘gross negligence,’” 474 U.S. at 334, n.3, is a matter for closer calls. County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 849 (1998). Our own decisions have not clarified this element of the test to any great extent; indeed, in Smith I, we applied the somewhat circular definition that conduct shocks the conscience if it 18 exhibits “a level of gross negligence or arbitrariness that indeed ‘shocks the conscience.’” 318 F.3d at 508. Still, our decisions do give us some guidance as to how to determine whether a given action “shocks the conscience.” As we have previously noted, “[t]he exact degree of wrongfulness necessary to reach the ‘conscience-shocking’ level depends upon the circumstances of a particular case.” Miller v. City of Philadelphia, 174 F.3d 368, 375 (3d Cir. 1999). In particular, we must determine whether the officer is confronted with a “hyperpressurized environment” such as a high-speed chase, or, in the alternative, has “the luxury of proceeding in a deliberate fashion.” See Smith I, 318 F.3d at 509. In the latter case, “deliberate indifference” may be sufficient to “shock the conscience,” e.g., Lewis, 523 U.S. at 850; in the former, it is usually necessary to show that the officer deliberately harmed the victim, see id. at 852. In Ziccardi v. City of Philadelphia, 288 F.3d 57, 66 (3d Cir. 2002), we determined that conscience-shocking behavior requires proof that the “defendants consciously disregarded, not just a substantial risk, but a great risk that serious harm would result.” That opinion, however, did not deal with the question whether this standard applied to cases raising state-created danger claims.10 10 Ziccardi observed: In Kneipp v. Tedder, 95 F.3d 1199 (3d Cir. 1996), which preceded Lewis, we held that deliberate indifference sufficed in a case in which state actors placed the plaintiff in a dangerous situation and the plaintiff was harmed by a nongovernmental actor. The case before us is not a “state created danger” case and is not governed by Kneipp. 288 F.3d at 65 n.5. Ziccardi followed our decision in Smith I. In Smith I, we concluded that Miller applied the “shocks the conscience” element to all § 1983 cases raising substantive due process claims, including state-created danger claims. We think that the definition adopted in Ziccardi is useful in assessing such 19 The question we must address, of course, is not simply whether the behavior of the troopers “shocks the conscience” under the applicable standard, but whether a reasonable officer would have realized as much. In this regard, “the salient question” we must ask is whether the law, as it existed in 1999, gave the troopers “fair warning” that their actions were unconstitutional. See Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730, 741 (2002). It is not necessary for the plaintiffs to identify a case presenting analogous factual circumstances, but they must show that the contours of the right at issue were “‘sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right.’” Id. at 739 (citation omitted). While the jurisprudence does not yield a clear definition of “conscience-shocking” (applicable to situations such as this), we agree with the District Court that the Smiths have not shown that a reasonable officer in the position of these troopers would have understood his conduct to be “conscience-shocking.” 11 We therefore conclude that the troopers are entitled to qualified immunity with respect to the state-created danger claim. The decisions cited by the Smiths are not to the contrary. For instance, in Rivas v. City of Passaic, 365 F.3d 181 (3d Cir. 2004), we considered a situation in which two paramedics responded to a call from a man who was apparently having a seizure. According to the paramedics, the man became belligerent and attacked them, and they called for police assistance. Upon arriving, the police restrained the man, and in so doing caused his death. In a subsequent § 1983 action, we held that the paramedics were not entitled to qualified immunity on a statecreated danger claim. We relied on the fact that there were disputed issues of material fact that needed to be resolved by a claims. 11 As the Supreme Court has acknowledged, the question whether conduct which is neither intentionally harmful nor merely negligent “shocks the conscience” is frequently “a matter for closer calls.” Lewis, 523 U.S. at 849. Yet the qualified immunity jurisprudence teaches us that “closer calls” are usually to be resolved in favor of the officer. 20 jury. Most importantly, we noted that a reasonable jury could conclude that the paramedics had falsely told the police that the man had attacked them and further failed to communicate to the police that he had suffered from a seizure and therefore should not be restrained. See 396 F.3d at 196. Such behavior, we concluded, shocked the conscience, and a reasonable paramedic would have recognized as much. The facts of this case are not analogous. The deception of the paramedics in Rivas led the police to restrain the seizure victim in that case, even though the paramedics knew that it was inappropriate to do so. We concluded that a reasonable paramedic would recognize that such behavior is not only inappropriate, but conscious-shocking. In this case, the wrongfulness of the troopers’ conduct was not nearly as clear. While there is sufficient evidence in the record for a reasonable jury to conclude that the troopers were negligent, we simply cannot conclude that a reasonable officer in their position would have recognized that his conduct shocked the conscience. For this reason, the troopers are entitled to qualified immunity with respect to this claim. This conclusion applies to all of the actions taken by the troopers that could arguably support a state-created danger claim, including the formation of the initial perimeter around Smith’s house, the activation of SERT, and the subsequent search in the woods.12 None of these decisions appears to have “consciously disregarded, not just a substantial risk, but a great risk that serious harm would result.” Ziccardi, 288 F.3d at 66. There is evidence from which a reasonable jury could conclude that the 12 Since we conclude that the Smiths have a viable Fourth Amendment claim with regard to the entrance into the house and shed, we need not address that claim as a separate Fourteenth Amendment violation. See United States v. Lanier, 520 U.S. 259, 272 (1997) (“[I]f a constitutional claim is covered by a specific constitutional provision, such as the Fourth or Eighth Amendment, the claim must be analyzed under the standard appropriate to that specific provision, not under the rubric of substantive due process.”). 21 troopers’ efforts to locate Smith in the woods were inadequate.13 That said, we see nothing in the record that would permit us to conclude that a reasonable officer would have known that the conduct of the search was “conscience shocking.” We recognize that, in Rivas, we held that as of November 1998, our case law had established the general proposition that state actors may not abandon a private citizen in a dangerous situation, provided that the state actors are aware of the risk of serious harm and are partly responsible for creating the opportunity for that harm to happen. 365 F.3d at 200. Yet we think a reasonable officer could recognize a difference between abandoning a private citizen with whom he had come in contact and failing to prolong a twohour search for a private citizen whom he has been unable to locate, see supra n.13. At this stage, such a difference is sufficient for the officers to be entitled to qualified immunity. For the foregoing reasons, we will affirm the District 13 The deposition testimony of Smith’s neighbor, Christopher Zwicky, supports the view that the search was inadequate. Zwicky approached the command center upon hearing a helicopter overhead and, after learning what had happened the previous evening, offered to help with the search. The police refused to let Zwicky enter the woods but did allow him to go up in the helicopter to help direct the search. In addition, according to Zwicky, the police also reviewed an aerial photograph of the surrounding area with him. Zwicky testified that he told the police that there were two areas where Smith was likely to hide: a deer blind and what he described as a “super thick sticker patch.” According to Zwicky, the police located the deer blind, but made little or no effort to find the second location. Indeed, according to his testimony, “[the police] bagged it and went home” after finding the deer blind. Zwicky further testified that he remained in the command post for another hour, but “they had pretty much decided they were going to quit for the day then. As the District Court found, the search of the woods lasted about two hours. 22 Court’s grant of summary judgment on the state-created danger claim. In doing do, we acknowledge that the panel in Smith I held that the Smiths had “produced sufficient evidence to allow a reasonable jury to conclude that the officers’ conduct both with regard to activating SERT and with regard to searching of the woods shocked the conscience.” 318 F.3d at 509. We think, however, that the question whether a reasonable officer would have had “fair warning” at the time that his conduct shocked the conscience is sufficiently different to warrant the result we reach. The difference may be subtle, but the shocks the conscience standard is somewhat vague, and we are satisfied that fair warning was absent here. Because we conclude that the Smiths cannot show that a reasonable officer would have recognized that his conduct was “conscience-shocking,” we need not address the other elements of the state-created danger test. We will therefore affirm the decision of the District Court that all defendants were entitled to qualified immunity with respect to the state-created danger claim.