Opinion ID: 795351
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Municipal Liability Under Monell

Text: 37 Segal also argues that the district court abused its discretion when it failed to address evidence that would lend support to her theory of liability under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658, 98 S.Ct. 2018, 56 L.Ed.2d 611 (1978). She appears to argue that Matos's inadequate investigation was the result of the Department's failure to properly train its investigators and this failure to train is an independent constitutional violation. We know of no case that supports such a broad reading of Monell. 38 Monell does not provide a separate cause of action for the failure by the government to train its employees; it extends liability to a municipal organization where that organization's failure to train, or the policies or customs that it has sanctioned, led to an independent constitutional violation. See Monell, 436 U.S. at 694, 98 S.Ct. 2018 (involving a policy that was the moving force of the constitutional violation); see also City of Canton v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378, 109 S.Ct. 1197, 103 L.Ed.2d 412 (1989) (involving a failure to train municipal employees that led to the constitutional injury). The district court recognized as much when it heard oral argument on the defendants' motion for summary judgment: Well, if the due process claim fails, [then I] don't reach Monell.  Because the district court properly found no underlying constitutional violation, its decision not to address the municipal defendants' liability under Monell was entirely correct. 39 To be sure, the Department's alleged failure to train its investigators could have contributed to at least two significant errors underlying the Matos report. First, the Matos report rested principally upon statements obtained from five children implicated in the attack on Student A. Nowhere does Matos account for the strong incentive on the part of these five- and six-year-olds to shift the blame to Segal. Second, the report accepts the statements made by these small children as the truth without detailing the method by which Matos questioned the children, stating whether leading or suggestive questions were used, providing a record of the interviews, accounting for material inconsistencies among the statements, or providing accounts of other children not implicated in the altercation. The veracity of the students' accounts remains an unresolved question. 40 Even if these errors were the result of the Department's failure to train its investigators and that failure led directly to Segal's termination, that failure has little to do with the theory of liability that she advances. The Department's failure to train its investigators is not directly related to the adequacy of the process afforded by the Department at the post-termination name-clearing hearing. Although the failure to train may increase the risk that an erroneous deprivation might go unrefuted, the procedures available at the C-31 hearing are sufficient to mitigate that risk. At the C-31 hearing, Segal could have cross-examined Matos as to the adequacy and methods of his investigation and pointed to any training he lacked, presented witnesses on her own behalf, and made all the training-related arguments she now advances. 41 Because any purported failure to train has at best marginal relevance to the merits of Segal's procedural due process claims, the district court did not err in refusing to consider it.