Opinion ID: 754255
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Taking Davis Into Custody Established a Duty

Text: 15 With respect to the first question, we start from the proposition that although the state does not owe its citizens a constitutional duty to keep them from harm in all circumstances, such a duty will arise when the state has acted to deprive an individual of certain indicia of liberty: 16 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. 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. 17 DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dep't of Soc. Servs., 489 U.S. 189, 200, 109 S.Ct. 998, 1005-06, 103 L.Ed.2d 249 (1989) (citation omitted). 18 In the present case, Davis's complaint alleges--and the record can reasonably be read to show--that after taking Davis into custody, the defendant officers dropped Davis off on a dark, busy highway and left him there against his will. In so doing, the defendant officers took the affirmative act of restraining Davis's freedom to act on his own behalf, and consequently imposed upon themselves a duty to ensure that they were not placing him in danger. 19 The defendants rely on Foy v. City of Berea, 58 F.3d 227 (6th Cir.1995), to argue that they did not infringe upon Davis's liberty. In Foy, the plaintiff had been drinking in a dormitory with his friends. After receiving a complaint, the police came to the dormitory and told them, Get in your car and get out of here or somebody is getting arrested. Id. at 228. Although the police had told them only to leave the premises, the plaintiff and his friends decided to take a lengthy drive from Berea, Kentucky, to Crestline, Ohio. Forty-five minutes into that journey, the driver crashed the car, killing Foy. Id. This court held that the defendant police officers had not violated Foy's right to substantive due process, since there was no restraint on his liberty that had caused him to take the trip that resulted in his death. Id. at 230. Foy, however, is inapposite. The distinguishing factor between Foy and this case is that the officers never took the men in Foy into custody and, therefore, never assumed a duty to provide for their safety. 20 The defendant officers argue that they owed no duty of care to Davis because his injuries occurred after they released him from custody and they did nothing to prevent Davis from caring for himself. The defendant officers cite DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 201, 109 S.Ct. at 1006, for this proposition. In DeShaney, the mother of a child who had been beaten by his father brought a civil rights action against social workers and local officials who had received complaints that the child was being abused by his father but had not removed him from his father's custody. The Supreme Court held that the state had no constitutional duty to protect the child because the harms [the child] suffered did not occur while he was in the State's custody, but while he was in the custody of his natural father ... Id. The Supreme Court held that in the substantive due process analysis, it is the State's affirmative act of restraining the individual's freedom to act on his own behalf--through incarceration, institutionalization, or other similar restraint of personal liberty--which is the 'deprivation of liberty' triggering the protections of the Due Process Clause, not its failure to act to protect his liberty interests against harms inflicted by other means. Id. at 200, 109 S.Ct. at 1006. Even though the state had previously taken the child into custody, the Supreme Court held that the State does not become the permanent guarantor of an individual's safety by having once offered him shelter. Id. at 201, 109 S.Ct. at 1006. 21 DeShaney, however, is not dispositive here. Language in that opinion suggests that the state may owe a duty to individuals in certain non-custodial settings: 22 While the State 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. That the State once took temporary custody of Joshua does not alter the analysis, for when it returned him to his father's custody, it placed him in no worse position than that in which he would have been had it not acted at all; the State does not become the permanent guarantor of an individual's safety by having once offered him shelter. 23 489 U.S. at 201, 109 S.Ct. at 1006. Significantly, we have previously suggested that this language in DeShaney stands for the proposition that a duty to protect can arise in a noncustodial setting if the state does anything to render an individual more vulnerable to danger. Gazette v. City of Pontiac, 41 F.3d 1061, 1065 (6th Cir.1994). Unlike the situation in DeShaney, moreover, the defendant officers in this case placed Davis in a more dangerous situation than he was prior to their interference, when they drove him outside the Flint city limits and abandoned him on a dark and dangerous highway in an unfamiliar area. 24 Likewise, the defendant officers' contention that the release of Davis from their custody terminated their duty is unavailing. The holding in Stemler, 126 F.3d at 867-868, established that an officer's duty exists even after the custodial relationship has ended. In Stemler, this court determined that police officers violated a woman's substantive due process rights when they took her from a car in which she had been riding and placed her in a truck driven by her abusive, intoxicated boyfriend, who wrecked shortly thereafter. The court found that the woman was deprived of her liberty (and ultimately her life) without due process when the police threatened to arrest her if she did not leave with her boyfriend and, subsequently, physically placed her in his truck. Even though the woman was out of police custody when she was killed, we held that the police had a duty to protect her by focusing on the fact that she was in the officers' custody at the time she was forced into the truck. Id. at 869. 25 Just as the police in Stemler had a duty to the plaintiff because they put her in harm's way, the defendant officers here owed Davis a duty. Based on Stemler, the fact that Davis's injuries resulted after the defendant officers released him from custody is not controlling. What is key is that the defendant officers put Davis in a situation, while in custody, and allegedly against his will, that caused his injuries. 26 Finally, the defendant officers assert that in 1994 there was no clearly established right not to be abandoned by the police and rely on Walton v. City of Southfield, 995 F.2d 1331, 1337 (6th Cir.1993), to support this assertion. Walton, however, is inapposite. The plaintiffs in Walton were child passengers in a car driven by a woman who was arrested. The children were left to find a way home on their own. The court held that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity because DeShaney did not recognize a passenger's clearly established right not to be abandoned by the police after the arrest of the driver of the vehicle in which they were riding. Id. at 1337. The court also stated, however, that DeShaney did not foreclose the possibility that such a right existed if abandonment in a forlorn place was connected with the state's restraint of an individual's personal liberty. Id. 27 Unlike the children in Walton, Davis was in custody when he was abandoned. Because the defendant officers had custody of Davis, they owed him a duty of protection that was violated when they abandoned him, in the words of Walton, in a forlorn place. 28