Opinion ID: 2966238
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Claims against Children's Hospital, Newberger,

Text: Tischelman, Kern, and McCarthy We dispose of these claims with a common holding that because all of these defendants were private actors, they cannot be subjected to Section 1983 liability as having acted under color of state law. We apply the familiar test first articulated in Ponce v. Basketball Fed'n of Puerto Rico , 760 F.2d 375 (1st Cir. 1985), to determine if one can be considered a state actor: (1) whether there was an elaborate financial or regulatory nexus between appellants and the government . . . which compelled appellants to act as they did, (2) an assumption by appellants of a traditionally public function, or (3) a symbiotic relationship involving the sharing of profits. Id. at 377. Appellants concede that the court did not ask Children's Hospital and Dr. Newberger to do anything. Instead, appellants claim that state action stemmed from the fact that Dr. Newberger knew that his reports would be used by the court. Clearly, the district court was correct in holding that mere knowledge of probable future use met none of the three tests. Likewise, Dr. Tischelman must also be accorded private actor status, because her involvement was merely that of a member of Newberger's team and the interviewer of Brown's younger children. Defendant Kern's liability as a state actor is pressed on the basis that she filed a report of suspected sexual abuse of Brenden Linnehan with DSS. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 119, § 51A, requires a wide variety of social and health workers to file such reports if they have reasonable cause to believe a child is suffering from sexual abuse. Both the failure to file reports and frivolous filings are punishable by fine. One required to file such a report is protected from criminal or civil liability. Within sixty days from receipt of such a report, DSS must notify the reporter of its determination of the nature, extent, and causes of injuries and the social services it intends to provide. While this kind of mandatory reporting goes somewhat beyond the cases dealing with the voluntary furnishing of information to the police, which we have considered in Rivera-Ramos v. Roman , 156 F.3d 276, 282 (1st Cir. 1998), and Roche v. John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. , 81 F.3d 249, 254 n.2 (1st Cir. 1996), we conclude that the reporting requirement under section 51A does not create the kind of regulatory nexus that could justify treating Kern as a state actor. The specific action of Kern was merely to signal the need for DSS to look into the matter and decide for itself whether there was a problem and what to do about it. Nothing seems more counterintuitive to us than to reason that a statute which protects one who complies from civil or criminal actions under state law should be the vehicle for subjecting the actor to liability under federal law. Although this issue has, understandably, arisen only rarely in decided cases, we agree with the holdings in Thomas v. Beth Israel Hospital Inc. , 710 F. Supp. 935 (S.D.N.Y. 1989), and Haag v. Cuyahoga County , 619 F. Supp. 262, 283 (N.D. Oh. 1985), aff'd , 798 F.2d 1414 (6th Cir. 1986) (filing a mandatory child abuse report does not constitute state action). (1) Defendant McCarthy, earlier alleged to have been a court-appointed investigator by plaintiffs, was later emphatically characterized as a private individual by plaintiffs, who asserted that Brenden's parents had agreed that he was to be the child's therapist and report periodically to the court's Department of Probation. Appellants invoke state actor status, based on the action of McCarthy in filing the reports. In McCarthy's case, there is not even a statutory framework for such action, it being the product of agreement between private parties. Nor are any of the other determinants of state action implicated.