Opinion ID: 749872
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Creating the Opportunity for Harm

Text: 45 The final element of the Kneipp test is whether the state actor used its authority to create an opportunity which otherwise would not have existed for the specific harm to occur. The district court read this requirement to contemplate that a state actor must affirmatively act to create the risk which results in harm to the plaintiff. Under the allegations presented here, the district court concluded that the only affirmative act attributable to the defendants was the assertion they unlocked the door to facilitate the work of the various contractors at the high school. The district court declined to address whether the act of unlocking the door rose to the level required to impose liability under the state-created danger theory, Morse, 1996 WL 677514, at  6 (quoting Kneipp, 95 F.3d at 1207), relying instead on plaintiff's failure to satisfy the foreseeable plaintiff requirement under Kneipp. 46 The case law addressing the question whether an affirmative act is required under the state-created danger theory, and if so what constitutes an affirmative act for purposes of liability, is less than clear. Conduct that has been held to be an affirmative act under one set of facts has not met that standard in a similar setting. For example, we held in Kneipp that the police officer's act of interven[ing] to cut off Samantha's private source of protection by giving Joseph permission to go home alone constituted an affirmative act for purposes of § 1983 liability. 14 95 F.3d at 1210; see also Wood v. Ostrander, 879 F.2d 583 (9th Cir.1989), cert. denied, 498 U.S. 938, 111 S.Ct. 341, 112 L.Ed.2d 305 (1990) (trooper liable for arresting driver of vehicle and leaving female passenger alone in a high crime area); White v. Rochford, 592 F.2d 381 (7th Cir.1979) (arresting driver and leaving minor passengers behind in vehicle on side of highway gave rise to constitutional claim). 47 By comparison, the opinion in Gregory v. City of Rogers, 974 F.2d 1006 (8th Cir.1992), draws a different conclusion from a similar act. In that instance, the police removed the designated driver of a vehicle because of an outstanding arrest warrant, and left behind two intoxicated persons who subsequently drove off and were involved in an accident. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held the police officer could not be held to have affirmatively placed the intoxicated passengers in danger. 48 Courts that have addressed this issue have pointed out that the line between an affirmative act and an omission is difficult to draw. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit said: 49 We do not want to pretend that the line between action and inaction, between inflicting and failing to prevent the infliction of harm, is clearer than it is. If the state puts a man in a position of danger from private persons and then fails to protect him, it will not be heard to say that its role was merely passive; it is as much an active tortfeasor as if it had thrown him into a snake pit. 50 Bowers v. DeVito, 686 F.2d 616, 618 (7th Cir.1982) The district court here noted this difficulty when it said that [s]tate-created danger law does not address the question of when an act crosses the line and becomes an affirmative act warranting Section 1983 liability. Morse at  6 n. 11. 51 Whether an affirmative act rather than an act of omission is required under the state-created danger theory appears to have been answered by Mark. As the Mark court noted, one of the common factors in cases addressing the state-created danger is that the state actors used their authority to create an opportunity that otherwise would not have existed for the third party's crime to occur. Mark, 51 F.3d at 1152. Thus, the dispositive factor appears to be whether the state has in some way placed the plaintiff in a dangerous position that was foreseeable, and not whether the act was more appropriately characterized as an affirmative act or an omission. 52 The following cases are illustrative of this principle. In Mitchell v. Duval County Sch. Bd., 107 F.3d 837 (11th Cir.1997), the court of appeals rejected a state-created danger claim under facts analogous to the case before us. The decedent, Richard Mitchell, was a fourteen year-old student who was shot and killed one evening while waiting for a ride home from a school function. Mitchell had attempted to telephone his father from inside the school administration office, but was denied entry. Instead he used an outside pay phone, and, while waiting for his father on a driveway adjacent to the school, was shot and killed during a robbery attempt. The court of appeals rejected plaintiff's state-created danger theory on the grounds that he failed to show that the state affirmatively placed decedent in a position of danger. Id. at 839. According to the court, nothing the school did required [decedent] to wait where he did. Indeed, the boy could have waited inside the administration building or immediately outside, rather than waiting a considerable distance away on the edge of the school's parking lot. Because the plaintiffs could prove no set of facts which would demonstrate that either an act or omission on the part of the state actors placed the decedent closer to the ultimate harm, the court of appeals affirmed the dismissal of the complaint. 53 In a case before this Court, two high school students filed a § 1983 claim alleging they were sexually molested by fellow students in the bathroom and darkroom of their graphic arts class room. D.R. v. Middle Bucks Area Vocational Tech. Sch., 972 F.2d 1364 (3d Cir.1992) (en banc), cert. denied, 506 U.S. 1079, 113 S.Ct. 1045, 122 L.Ed.2d 354 (1993). According to their complaint, the high school's failure to adequately supervise the class or investigate the misconduct created the dangerous situation that resulted in their injuries. We affirmed the dismissal of the complaint, holding that the school was not liable because the plaintiffs did not demonstrate that the state placed the plaintiffs in danger, increased their risk of harm, or made them more vulnerable to danger. Plaintiffs did not suffer harm, however, from that kind of foreseeable risk.... Plaintiff's harm came about solely through the acts of private persons without the level of intermingling of state conduct with private violence that supported liability in Wood, Swader, and Cornelius. 972 F.2d at 1375. 54 In both cases, there was no direct causal connection between the acts or omissions of the state and the harm which befell the victim. In neither case was it the act or omission of the state actor that directly placed the victim in harm's way. The same can be said of the case before us. Plaintiff does not allege, nor can he prove, that defendants placed Diane Morse in a dangerous environment stripped of means to defend [herself] and cut off from sources of aid. Johnson, 38 F.3d at 202. Nor does plaintiff allege that defendants placed her in a unique confrontational encounter with Stovall. Cornelius, 880 F.2d at 359. What plaintiff does allege is that defendants, by unlocking the rear entrance of the school building, increased the risk to Diane Morse ... and left Diane Morse vulnerable to the actions of her attacker. Complaint p 44. As we have already noted, however, Stovall's deadly attack was not a foreseeable and fairly direct result of defendants' behavior. Plaintiff, therefore, can prove no set of facts that will demonstrate that defendants placed Diane Morse in harm's way, and consequently has not satisfied the fourth prong of the Kneipp test.