Opinion ID: 766396
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Substantive Due-Process Claims

Text: 69 The Tenenbaums also contend that Sarah's temporary removal for the purpose of subjecting her to a medical examination violated their and Sarah's substantive due-process rights. 11 The district court granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment on this claim, finding that defendants' deprivation of the Tenenbaums of their child for a single afternoon for a medical examination did not significantly infringe their fundamental right to live together without interference from the state. Tenenbaum I, 862 F. Supp. at 969. We agree with the district court's conclusion, although we affirm its grant of summary judgment as to the claim brought on Sarah's behalf on different grounds. 70 The Supreme Court has held that [w]here a particular Amendment provides an explicit textual source of constitutional protection against a particular sort of government behavior, that Amendment, not the more generalized notion of 'substantive due process,' must be the guide for analyzing these claims. 71 Albright v. Oliver, 510 U.S. 266, 273 (1994) (plurality opinion of Rehnquist, C.J.) (quoting Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 395 (1989)). Substantive due process analysis is therefore inappropriate in this case . . . if [the] claim is 'covered by' the Fourth Amendment. County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 843 (1998). As discussed below, Sarah's removal and her examination constituted a seizure and search, respectively, under the Fourth Amendment and the Tenenbaums have standing to assert a Fourth Amendment-based claim against the defendants on Sarah's behalf. Their claim on Sarah's behalf therefore must be analyzed under the standard appropriate to [the Fourth Amendment], not under the rubric of substantive due process. United States v. Lanier, 520 U.S. 259, 272 n.7 (1997). We affirm the dismissal of the substantive due-process claim brought on Sarah's behalf on this ground. 72 The Tenenbaums do not have-- or at least no longer allege-- cognizable Fourth Amendment claims based on Sarah's examination and removal. See note 13, infra. It is therefore appropriate to analyze whether their claims are redressible as substantive due-process violations. Because we find that they are not, we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment on those claims. 73 The Tenenbaums and their family have, in general terms, a substantive right under the Due Process Clause to remain together without the coercive interference of the awesome power of the state. Duchesne, 566 F.2d at 825. We could agree with the Tenenbaums that this right was violated by the defendants in this case only if we were to conclude that the removal of Sarah for several hours under these circumstances would have been prohibited by the Constitution even had the Tenenbaums been given all the procedural protections to which they were entitled. See Daniels v. Williams, 474 U.S. 327, 331 (1986) (substantive due-process rights bar certain government actions regardless of the fairness of the procedures used to implement them.). The substantive rights arising out of the Due Process Clause are not so broad. 74 [T]he touchstone of due process is protection of the individual against arbitrary action of government. County of Sacramento, 523 U.S. at 845 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Substantive due-process rights guard against the government's exercise of power without any reasonable justification in the service of a legitimate governmental objective. Id. at 846 (citation omitted). [O]nly the most egregious official conduct can be said to be 'arbitrary in the constitutional sense' and therefore unconstitutional. Id. (citation omitted). There is no basis for us to hold that a temporary separation of Sarah from her parents in an effort to obtain assurance that she had not been abused would have been so shocking, arbitrary, and egregious that the Due Process Clause would not countenance it even were it accompanied by full procedural protection. No judicial proceedings were in fact employed here, but that is relevant only to our conclusion that the Tenenbaums and Sarah may have been deprived of procedural due process, not to whether their substantive due-process rights were implicated. 75 Thus, in Joyner v. Dumpson, 712 F.2d 770 (2d Cir. 1983), we analyzed whether New York's mandatory custody transfer requirement as embodied in N.Y. Soc. Serv. Law 358-a and 384-a violated plaintiffs' right to family integrity protected by substantive rights arising out of the Due Process Clause. In disagreeing with the district court's conclusion that it did, we emphasized that the custody transfer contemplated would not deprive parents completely of the right to rear their children. We stated that such a transfer does not result in parents' wholesale relinquishment of their right to rear their children, because there the parents retained substantial responsibility for important decisions in their child's life. Id. at 778. 76 Here, Sarah was taken from P.S. 230 at about noon on January 9, 1990 and was returned to her parents hours later. The temporary separation of Sarah from her parents did not result in the Tenenbaums' wholesale relinquishment of their right to raise Sarah. The interference was not severe enough to constitute a violation of their substantive due-process rights. 12 77 The Tenenbaums aver that the duration of an imposed separation has no bearing on the substantive due-process analysis. The cases on which they rely, however, are inapposite. In United States v. Langer, 958 F.2d 522 (2d Cir. 1992), for example, we determined that police detention even for ten to fifteen minutes was constitutionally significant for purposes of 18 U.S.C. 242. See id. at 524. The right implicated in Langer was the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizures and in that context we recognized that even a brief seizure is a serious intrusion upon the sanctity of the person. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Similarly, in Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U.S. 721 (1969), the Supreme Court found that the detention of the defendant at police headquarters, even for a short period of time, violated the Fourth Amendment where there was no probable cause for arrest. The Tenenbaums ask us to extrapolate from Langer and Davis a rule that the separation of child and parent for a short period of time, no matter what procedural protections accompany it, constitutes a violation of the right to family integrity. There is no basis for us to do so. It does not follow from the principle that brief seizures of people may be unreasonable and therefore violate the Fourth Amendment that brief removals of children from their parents to protect them from abuse are without any reasonable justification in the service of a legitimate governmental objective, County of Sacramento, 523 U.S. at 846, under the Due Process Clause. The district court properly granted summary judgment for all the defendants on this claim.