Opinion ID: 781653
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: DeShaney and the Question of Unavoidable Liability

Text: 30 The plaintiffs do not mention the dangers that the officials would have faced if they had chosen to restrain Bukowski. For an official cannot, of course, detain a person without justification. See, e.g., Bennett v. Ohio Dep't of Rehab. & Corr., 60 Ohio St.3d 107, 573 N.E.2d 633, 636 (1991) (noting that, under Ohio law, false imprisonment is established if a person confines another intentionally `without lawful privilege and against his consent') (citation omitted); Adams v. Metiva, 31 F.3d 375, 383 (6th Cir.1994) (noting that if there is no reason to further detain a person, he cannot lawfully be detained against his will). 31 The plaintiffs have not pointed to any legal rationale that would authorize the officials to hold Bukowski. The plaintiffs point to Ohio Juvenile Rule 6, which allows the police to take children into custody. See Ohio Rev.Code Ann. § 2151.31 (codifying Oh. St. Juv. P. Rule 6). The term child, however, is statutorily defined as a person who is under eighteen years of age. Ohio Rev.Code Ann. § 2151.011(B)(5). Bukowski, at the time of the incident, was nineteen and not under a guardianship of any kind. The plaintiffs next suggest that Bukowski should have been held for psychiatric hospitalization. They are correct when they argue that the police are allowed to hold the mentally incapacitated against their will. Yet, Ohio law requires that there first be a showing of a mentally ill person subject to hospitalization who presents a substantial risk of physical harm to self or others if allowed to remain at liberty pending examination. Ohio Rev.Code Ann. § 5122.10. The plaintiffs do not even allege that Bukowski can fit such restrictive criteria. 32 The plaintiffs argue that Urbank should have stretched the boundaries of these categories, perhaps by interpreting the juvenile rules to cover mentally disabled adults or by loosely construing the psychiatric-hospitalization requirements. This argument, however, reveals the difficult situation in which the officials here found themselves. By failing to detain Bukowski, they face this lawsuit. If they had chosen to detain her, they may have faced another lawsuit based on charges of false imprisonment. Under the legal theory adopted by the plaintiffs, the defendant officials would have violated the Constitution no matter how they acted. The Supreme Court has warned specifically against our placing governmental officials in such a position. See DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 203, 109 S.Ct. 998 (noting that if the defendants had moved too soon to take custody of the son away from the father, they would likely have been met with charges of improperly intruding into the parent-child relationship, charges based on the same Due Process Clause that forms the basis for the present charge of failure to provide adequate protection). 33 Based on the above analysis, it is clear that the plaintiffs cannot show that the Akron officials here violated Lisa Bukowski's substantive right to due process. 2 This may seem at first glance to be a harsh result. The plaintiffs stress that Bukowski's mental disability made her functionally like a child. They argue that the officials simply should not have acceded to Bukowski's wishes when she requested to be returned to Hall's residence. Under the law announced in DeShaney, however, officials have a constitutional obligation only to refrain from actively increasing an individual's susceptibility to private violence. They do not have a constitutional obligation to prevent such violence, and, in fact, they did not even possess legal authority under state law to intervene by detaining Bukowski. Moreover, given the knowledge that they had at the time they made the decision to let her go, it does not seem that they were aware of facts that would suggest that a substantial risk of serious harm existed. For these reasons, we hold that the officials Urbank and Summers should have been granted qualified immunity.