Opinion ID: 627228
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: DeShaney Recognizes a Limited Duty to Protect

Text: DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989), arose out of the tragic case of young Joshua DeShaney, who had been placed in state custody after the Winnebago County Department of Social Services suspected his father of child abuse. The agency subsequently returned Joshua to his home after finding insufficient evidence of abuse. Once at home, Joshua continued to endure beatings from his father, and was ultimately left with severe brain damage. Id. at 191-93. Joshua DeShaney and his mother sued the Winnebago County Department of Social Services and various individual defendants, alleging that the Department and its employees had violated Joshua’s substantive due process right by failing to protect him from his father’s violence even though they knew that he faced a very real danger of harm. Id. at 193. The Supreme Court rejected this claim, and held that the plaintiffs could not maintain an action under § 1983 because there had been no constitutional violation. Id. at 202. The Court noted that the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted to “protect the people from the State, not to ensure that the State protect[] them from each other.” Id. at 196. The Due Process Clause, the Court explained, “forbids the State itself to deprive individuals of life, liberty, or property without ‘due process of law,’ but its language cannot fairly be extended to impose an affirmative obligation on the State to ensure that those interests do not come to harm through other means.” Id. at 195. Thus, the Court concluded that “a State’s failure to protect an individual against private violence simply does not constitute a violation of the Due Process Clause.” Id. at 197. The Court noted that this categorical rule is subject to at least one very limited exception.4 Under this exception, a state may create a “special relationship” with a particular citizen, requiring the state to protect him from 4 Several courts of appeals have recognized a second limited exception, the so-called “state-created danger” theory. We address this theory below. 7 No. 09-60406 harm, “when the State takes a person into its custody and holds him there against his will.” Id. at 199-200. In such instances, “the Constitution imposes upon it a corresponding duty to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being.” Id. at 200. That special relationship exists when the state incarcerates a prisoner, Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 103-04 (1976), or involuntarily commits someone to an institution, Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 315-16 (1982). The DeShaney Court reasoned that: when the State by the affirmative exercise of its power so restrains an individual’s liberty that it renders him unable to care for himself, and at the same time fails to provide for his basic human needs—e.g., food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and reasonable safety—it transgresses the substantive limits on state action set by the Eighth Amendment and the Due Process Clause. DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 200. The Court stated that “[t]he affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State’s knowledge of the individual’s predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf.” Id. In addition to the circumstances of incarceration and involuntary institutionalization recognized by the Court in DeShaney, we have extended the special relationship exception to the placement of children in foster care. Griffith v. Johnston, 899 F.2d 1427, 1439 (5th Cir. 1990). We reasoned that the state assumes a constitutional duty to care for children under state supervision because “the state’s duty to provide services stems from the limitation which the state has placed on the individual’s ability to act on his own behalf.” Id. We have not extended the DeShaney special relationship exception beyond these three situations, and have explicitly held that the state does not create a special relationship with children attending public schools. 8 No. 09-60406 2. Schools and the Special Relationship Exception in the Fifth Circuit We have twice considered en banc whether the special relationship exception to the DeShaney rule applies in the context of public schools. Doe v. Hillsboro Indep. Sch. Dist., 113 F.3d 1412 (5th Cir. 1997) (en banc); Walton v. Alexander, 44 F.3d 1297 (5th Cir. 1995) (en banc). In both cases, we concluded that a public school does not have a special relationship with a student that would require the school to protect the student from harm at the hands of a private actor. In Walton v. Alexander, the student plaintiff attended the Mississippi School for the Deaf, a residential public school, and was sexually assaulted by a fellow student. 44 F.3d at 1299. The student plaintiff brought suit under § 1983, based upon the special relationship exception. Even though the school was a residential school, and thus responsible for fulfilling most of the students’ dayto-day needs, we held that the school had not created a special relationship with the student, because the student “attended [the] school voluntarily with the option of leaving at will.” Id. at 1305. In so holding, we “strictly” construed DeShaney and explained that it is “important to apply DeShaney as it is written.” Id. at 1303, 1305. We reasoned, “DeShaney emphasize[d] . . . that extending the Due Process Clause to impose on the state the obligation to defend and to pay for the acts of non-state third parties is a burden not supported by the text or history of the Clause, nor by general principles of constitutional jurisprudence.” Id. at 1305. We concluded that “[s]uch an expansion of the state’s liability for acts of third parties only can make constitutional sense . . . when the state has effectively taken the plaintiff’s liberty under terms that provide no realistic means of voluntarily terminating the state’s custody and which thus deprives the plaintiff of the ability or opportunity to provide for his own care and safety.” Id. (emphasis in original). It is only under these “extreme circumstances that the state itself, by its affirmative act and pursuant to its own will, has 9 No. 09-60406 effectively used its power to force a ‘special relationship,’ with respect to which it assumes a certain liability.” Id. We next addressed the special relationship exception in Doe v. Hillsboro Independent School District, where we likewise held that the exception did not apply in the context of a public school. 113 F.3d at 1415. The student plaintiff in that case was thirteen years old. She was “kept after school to do special work on her studies” and was sexually assaulted by a custodian (who was not alleged to have been acting under color of state law) when she was sent to an unoccupied area of the school to retrieve supplies for her teacher. Id. at 1414. We rejected the plaintiff’s argument that a special relationship existed between the school and the student due to the fact that school attendance was required by state law, and declined “to hold that compulsory attendance laws alone create a special relationship giving rise to a constitutionally rooted duty of school officials to protect students from private actors.” Id. at 1415. We reasoned that “[t]he restrictions imposed by attendance laws upon students and their parents are not analogous to the restraints of prisons and mental institutions” because “[t]he custody is intermittent,” “the student returns home each day,” and “[p]arents remain the primary source for the basic needs of their children.” Id. Numerous panel decisions have declined to recognize a special relationship between a public school and its students. See, e.g., Doe v. San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist., 197 F. App’x 296, 298-301 (5th Cir. 2006) (finding no special relationship between a school and a fourteen-year-old special education student when the student was allowed to leave with her “uncle,” who later allegedly molested her); Teague v. Tex. City Indep. Sch. Dist., 185 F. App’x 355, 357 (5th Cir. 2006) (finding no special relationship between a school and an eighteenyear-old special education student who was sexually assaulted by another special education student); Johnson v. Dallas Indep. Sch. Dist., 38 F.3d 198, 199, 202-03 (5th Cir. 1994) (finding no special relationship between a high school and 10 No. 09-60406 a student shot and killed in the school hallway during the school day by a boy who was not a student but had gained access to the school); Leffall v. Dallas Indep. Sch. Dist., 28 F.3d 521, 522, 529 (5th Cir. 1994) (finding no special relationship between a high school and a student fatally wounded by a gunshot fired in the school parking lot after a school dance). We reaffirm, then, decades of binding precedent: a public school does not have a DeShaney special relationship with its students requiring the school to ensure the students’ safety from private actors. Public schools do not take students into custody and hold them there against their will in the same way that a state takes prisoners, involuntarily committed mental health patients, and foster children into its custody. See DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 199-200; Griffith, 899 F.2d at 1439. Without a special relationship, a public school has no constitutional duty to ensure that its students are safe from private violence. That is not to say that schools have absolutely no duty to ensure that students are safe during the school day. Schools may have such a duty by virtue of a state’s tort or other laws. However, “[s]ection 1983 imposes liability for violations of rights protected by the Constitution, not for violations of duties of care arising out of tort law.” Baker v. McCollan, 443 U.S. 137, 146 (1979). Like our court, each circuit to have addressed the issue has concluded that public schools do not have a special relationship with their students, as public schools do not place the same restraints on students’ liberty as do prisons and state mental health institutions. See, e.g., Hasenfus v. LaJeunesse, 175 F.3d 68, 69-72 (1st Cir. 1999) (fourteen-year-old student attempted suicide after being sent unsupervised to a locker room); D.R. v. Middle Bucks Area Vocational Technical Sch., 972 F.2d 1364, 1366, 1370-73 (3d Cir. 1992) (en banc) (sixteenyear-old student was sexually assaulted by fellow students in a unisex bathroom and darkroom, both of which were part of a classroom where a teacher was present during the attacks); Stevenson ex rel. Stevenson v. Martin Cnty. Bd. of 11 No. 09-60406 Educ., 3 F. App’x 25, 27, 30-31 (4th Cir. 2001) (ten-year-old student assaulted by his classmates); Doe v. Claiborne Cnty., Tenn., 103 F.3d 495, 500-01, 509-10 (6th Cir. 1996) (fourteen-year-old student sexually assaulted by an athletic coach off school grounds); J.O. v. Alton Cmty. Unit Sch. Dist. 11, 909 F.2d 267, 268, 272-73 (7th Cir. 1990) (teacher sexually molested two “school-age children”); Dorothy J. v. Little Rock Sch. Dist., 7 F.3d 729, 731-34 (8th Cir. 1993) (intellectually disabled high school boy was sexually assaulted by another intellectually disabled student); Patel v. Kent Sch. Dist., 648 F.3d 965, 968-69, 972-74 (9th Cir. 2011) (developmentally disabled high school student was sexually assaulted by a classmate when she was permitted to use restroom alone even though her parents specifically requested that she be under adult supervision at all times due to her disability); Maldonado v. Josey, 975 F.2d 727, 728, 729-33 (10th Cir. 1992) (eleven-year-old boy died of accidental strangulation in an unsupervised cloakroom adjacent to his classroom during the school day); Wyke v. Polk Cnty. Sch. Bd., 129 F.3d 560, 563, 568-70 (11th Cir. 1997) (thirteen-year-old boy committed suicide a few days after unsuccessful attempts at school and school officials never told his mother of the attempts). 3. No Special Relationship Exists Here Against this backdrop, and the many decisions to the contrary, the Does (together with our dissenting colleagues) argue that Jane had a special relationship with her school, and therefore a substantive due process interest. They contend that compulsory school attendance laws, combined with Jane’s young age and the affirmative act of placing Jane into Keyes’s custody (what the Does describe as the Education Defendants’ “active, deliberatively indifferent, conduct”), created a special relationship in this case. None of these factors, however, provides a basis to conclude that the school assumed a constitutional duty to protect Jane. Instead, the Does’ argument ignores the contours of the special relationship exception to create a cause of action where none exists. 12 No. 09-60406
The Does (and the dissenters) rely largely upon Jane’s young age to distinguish this case from the many others in which we have held that schools have no special relationship with their students. We do not find Jane’s age to be a relevant distinguishing characteristic for purposes of the special relationship analysis.5 Although it is true that in our prior cases we have dealt with children older than Jane, we have never relied upon the age of the student at issue to resolve the special relationship analysis. Rather, we have said that schools do not have a special relationship with students because “[p]arents remain the primary source for the basic needs of their children.” Hillsboro, 113 F.3d at 1415. This is as much true for elementary students as it is for high school students. No matter the age of the child, parents are the primary providers of food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and reasonable safety for their minor children. Thus, school children are returned to their parents’ care at the end of each day, and are able to seek assistance from their families on a daily basis, unlike those who are incarcerated or involuntarily committed. 5 The Does (and our dissenting colleagues) contort a statement made by the Supreme Court in a wholly different context in Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651 (1977), into a suggestion that the Court would find a special relationship in this case. Addressing claims brought by a group of students alleging that corporal punishment in public schools was prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, the Court stated that “[t]he schoolchild has little need for the protections of the Eighth Amendment” because “the public school remains an open institution,” and “[e]xcept perhaps when very young, [a] child is not physically restrained from leaving school during school hours.” Id. at 670. The Court then listed a number of reasons why schools are open institutions. Yet the Court did not suggest that a public school is no less an open institution if a student is restrained from freely leaving the school due to her young age or if a student is apart from teachers or other students, whether on campus or off. Indeed, in an opinion written far more recently than Ingraham, the Court explicitly stated in dicta that its opinions should not be read to “suggest that public schools as a general matter have such a degree of control over children as to give rise to a constitutional ‘duty to protect.’” Vernonia Sch. Dist. 47J v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646, 655 (1995) (citing DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 200). 13 No. 09-60406 Jane’s immaturity is insufficient to distinguish this case from our decisions in Walton and Hillsboro. The suggestion that we ought to examine an individual’s characteristics to determine whether the state has assumed a duty to care for that person is wholly unsupported by precedent. The situations in which the state assumes a duty of care sufficient to create a special relationship are strictly enumerated and the restrictions of each situation are identical. In the circumstances of incarceration, involuntary institutionalization, and foster care, the state has, through an established set of laws and procedures, rendered the person in its care completely unable to provide for his or her basic needs and it assumes a duty to provide for these needs. Neither the Supreme Court nor this court has ever suggested that anything less than such a total restriction is sufficient to create a special relationship with the state, regardless of the age or competence of the individual. See DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 200 (“The affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State’s knowledge of the individual’s predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf.”). Moreover, the focus upon Jane’s young age makes an essentially arbitrary distinction between the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old students in Walton and Hillsboro and nine-year-old students like Jane. If we were to accept this argument, schools would be required to evaluate the maturity of each student to determine whether the school has a special relationship with that student. Indeed, some students could “age out” of constitutional protection over the course of one academic year. A constitutional duty to protect a student from harm does not depend on the maturity of the student, a factor not in the control of the state. Through their public school systems, states take on the responsibility of educating students, but, no matter the age of the student, public schools simply do not take on the responsibility of providing “food, clothing, shelter, medical 14 No. 09-60406 care, and reasonable safety” for the students they educate. See DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 200. Particularly instructive on this question is the Ninth Circuit’s recent decision in Patel v. Kent School District, 648 F.3d 965 (9th Cir. 2011). There, a developmentally disabled student had several sexual encounters with a classmate in a restroom adjacent to her classroom. Id. at 968. The student’s parents had requested that she remain under adult supervision at all times because her disability prevented her from recognizing dangerous situations and caused her to act inappropriately with others. Id. at 968-70. Nevertheless, the student’s teacher allowed her to use the restroom alone in order to foster her development. Id. at 969. The Ninth Circuit held that compulsory school attendance laws do not create a special relationship between public schools and students that would require schools to protect the students from harm. Id. at 973-74. Of particular import to this case, the Ninth Circuit also rejected the student’s contention that the school was required to protect against her “special vulnerabilities.” Id. at 974. The court reasoned that “[i]n the case of a minor child, custody does not exist until the state has so restrained the child’s liberty that the parents cannot care for the child’s basic needs,” and the student’s disability did not prevent her parents from caring for her basic needs. Id. (citing DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 199-201). Under the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning, the existence of a special relationship does not depend on the characteristics of the individual. Consistent with Patel, we conclude that Jane’s young age and immaturity do not provide a basis for finding a special relationship with her school. Our conclusion that no special relationship exists between nine-year-old Jane and her school is consistent with the decisions of our sister circuits, four of which have addressed cases involving children who were approximately the same age or even younger than Jane. See Allen v. Susquehanna Twp. Sch. Dist., 15 No. 09-60406 233 F. App’x 149, 151-53 (3d Cir. 2007) (finding no special relationship between school and developmentally disabled eleven-year-old student who left school grounds and was subsequently killed); Worthington v. Elmore Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 160 F. App’x 877, 878, 881 (11th Cir. 2005) (finding no special relationship between school and developmentally disabled seven-year-old student who was sexually assaulted by another student on a school bus); Stevenson, 3 F. App’x at 30-31 (finding no special relationship between school and ten-year-old boy who had been beaten up repeatedly by bullies during the school day); Maldonado, 975 F.2d at 728, 731-33 (finding no special relationship between school and eleven-year-old boy who died of accidental strangulation in an unsupervised cloakroom adjacent to his classroom during the school day). While we should have every reason to expect that public schools can and will provide for the safety of public school students, no matter their age, our precedents, and the decisions of every other circuit to have considered this issue, dictate that schools are simply not constitutionally required to ensure students’ safety from private actors. Despite her young age, Jane was not attending the school through the “affirmative exercise of [state] power,” DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 200; she was attending the school because her parents voluntarily chose to send her there (as one of several ways to fulfill their compulsory education obligations), and they remained responsible for her basic needs.6
6 Although it is true that Jane’s guardians were less able to protect Jane during the school day, this fact exists to some extent in every alleged special relationship case involving injuries that occurred at school. See, e.g., Patel, 648 F.3d at 969-70; Hasenfus, 175 F.3d at 7071; Middle Bucks, 972 F.2d at 1366; Maldonado, 975 F.2d at 728, 732-33; see also Stevenson, 3 F. App’x at 27-28. This fact has never been found to create a special relationship, as the parents remain the primary caregivers, and the child can turn to his or her parents for help on a daily basis. See Middle Bucks, 972 F.2d at 1372 (“D.R.’s complaint alleges an ongoing series of assaults and abuse over a period of months. Although these acts allegedly took place during the school day, D.R. could, and did, leave the school building every day. The state did nothing to restrict her liberty after school hours and thus did not deny her meaningful access to sources of help.”). 16 No. 09-60406 The Does also suggest that a special relationship exists because Jane’s attendance at school was mandated by compulsory attendance laws. We have specifically held, however, that compulsory school attendance laws do not “alone create a special relationship.” Hillsboro Indep. Sch. Dist., 113 F.3d at 1415. There is no indication that Jane’s attendance at the school was somehow more compulsory as a nine-year-old than if she were a teenager. While it may be true that elementary school students are subject to more rules during the school day (a fact not pleaded), their attendance at school is no more or less mandatory than teenagers’ attendance. In fact, Jane was subject to exactly the same Mississippi compulsory education laws as was the plaintiff in Walton, who voluntarily attended a residential school for the deaf. Mississippi requires parents to enroll their children in school until age seventeen, and parents may fulfill this requirement in several ways, only one of which is to send their child to public school. MISS. CODE ANN. § 37-13-91(3) (requiring that parent enroll compulsory school-age child in a public school, a “legitimate nonpublic school,” or provide a “legitimate home instruction program”). It may well be true that, for the vast majority of parents in Mississippi, the only way for them to fulfill their obligation is to enroll their children in public school. But that practicality does not alter the fact that Jane’s parents voluntarily sent her to the school as a means of fulfilling their obligation to educate her. Jane’s parents were free at any time to remove Jane from the school if they felt that her safety was being compromised. This reality is a far cry from the situation of incarcerated prisoners, institutionalized mental health patients, or children placed in foster care. Mississippi’s compulsory education law is therefore insufficient under our precedent to create a special relationship between the school and Jane, despite Jane’s young age. 17 No. 09-60406
As a final effort to distinguish this case from the many others in this area, the Does contend that the “active, deliberately indifferent, conduct” of school officials in releasing Jane to Keyes formed a special relationship. The dissent similarly argues that a special relationship was created when the school separated Jane from her teachers and classmates and delivered her into Keyes’ exclusive custody. This argument, however, has several flaws. Even assuming that the school had custody over Jane to the exclusion of her legal guardians, which it did not, the school did not knowingly transfer that custody to an unauthorized individual. The complaint alleges that the school employee releasing Jane committed an affirmative act, but does not assert that the school employee actually knew that Keyes was unauthorized to take Jane from school. Implicit in the Supreme Court’s holding that a state may create a special relationship through an “affirmative exercise of its power,” DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 200, is the requirement that the state actor know that he or she is restricting an individual’s liberty. When a state incarcerates a prisoner, institutionalizes a mental health patient, or places a child in foster care, the state knows that it has restricted the individual’s liberty and rendered him unable to care for his basic human needs. When a school employee carelessly fails to ensure that an adult is authorized to take an elementary student from the school, no state actor has knowledge that the school has thereby restricted the student’s liberty, because the adult taking the student from school may or may not be authorized. The Does’ (and the dissent’s) theory also suggests that the same act that creates the special relationship can also violate the duty of care owed to the student. Under the special relationship exception, the state assumes a duty to care for and protect an individual. Once the special relationship is created, it is the failure to fulfill that duty that gives rise to a constitutional violation. An 18 No. 09-60406 allegation of deliberate indifference may be sufficient to violate a constitutional duty, but it is not sufficient to create the constitutional duty. Furthermore, this theory suggests that the school’s very act of releasing Jane into the custody of a private actor somehow created the state custody that is necessary for a DeShaney special relationship to exist in the first place. Such a theory is wholly inconsistent with DeShaney itself. 489 U.S. at 199-200 (“[W]hen the State takes a person into its custody and holds him there against his will, the Constitution imposes upon it a corresponding duty to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being.”) (emphasis added). The Tenth Circuit in Graham v. Independent School District No. I-89, 22 F.3d 991 (10th Cir. 1994), rejected an argument similar to the one the Does raise here. In that case, Graham brought suit under Section 1983 against a school district after certain students shot and killed her son on school property during the school day.7 Graham alleged that the school knew that her child was in danger of being harmed, but failed to take appropriate protective measures. Id. at 993. The plaintiffs argued that the school’s “knowledge of the violent propensities of one of its students . . . coupled with the quasi-custodial nature of school attendance, satisfies the standards articulated in DeShaney.” Id. at 994. The court rejected this argument, holding that “foreseeability cannot create an affirmative duty to protect when plaintiff remains unable to allege a custodial relationship.” Id. The court concluded: [i]naction by the state in the face of a known danger is not enough to trigger the obligation; according to DeShaney the state must have limited in some way the liberty of a citizen to act on his own behalf. In the absence of a custodial relationship, we believe plaintiffs cannot state a constitutional claim based upon the defendants’ alleged knowledge of dangerous circumstances. 7 The appeal was considered jointly with another suit, which was brought by the mother of a student who was stabbed on school premises. Graham, 22 F.3d at 993. 19 No. 09-60406 Id. at 995 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). Thus, the state’s failure to protect the student from private harm (even if foreseeable) did not give rise to a constitutional claim in the absence of a finding that a custodial relationship already existed. The Does point us to no distinguishing characteristics of this case that are sufficient to give rise to a DeShaney special relationship between Jane and her school. This case is ultimately no different than Walton and Hillsboro, and thus requires the same outcome. 4. Conclusion The question posed to us is whether Jane’s school, through its affirmative exercise of state power, assumed a constitutional duty to protect Jane from a private actor. We are compelled by our precedent, and by the Supreme Court’s guidance in DeShaney, to conclude that the school did not assume that duty. The district court correctly held that the Does have failed to state a claim under § 1983 for a constitutional violation under the special relationship exception. Because we find no special relationship, we do not address whether the school’s alleged actions in releasing Jane to Keyes amounted to “deliberate indifference.” As this en banc court previously explained in McClendon v. City of Columbia, 305 F.3d 314 (5th Cir. 2002), only where a state first creates a special relationship with an individual does the state then have “a constitutional duty to protect that individual from dangers, including, in certain circumstances, private violence.” Id. at 324; see also Walton, 44 F.3d at 1300-01 (explaining that if a state creates a special relationship with an individual, it will then owe “some duty—arising under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution—to protect [the individual’s] bodily integrity from third party non-state actors.”). Without a special relationship, the school had no constitutional duty to protect Jane from private actors such as Keyes, and the question of its alleged deliberate indifference is simply immaterial. 20 No. 09-60406 Having concluded that the school had no special relationship with Jane that imposed on the school a constitutional duty to protect her from private harm, we now turn to the Does’ remaining theories of liability.