Opinion ID: 2165417
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Plaintiffs' Due Process Claims

Text: Plaintiffs assert that when they were placed in foster care they remained within the ambit of the defendants' custodial responsibility, where defendants were obligated to take supervisory and interventive steps to keep them free from harm. They further allege that while they were in foster care defendants failed to accord them the protective services to which they were entitled under titles 4 and 6 of article 6 of the Social Services Law. Based on these claims, plaintiffs contend that they have been denied due process of law. Plaintiffs apparently do not include non-foster care children within this claim. [1] Plaintiffs have asserted violations of the substantive component of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitutionsometimes called substantive due processas well as violations of the procedural component of the Due Process Clause. In general, procedural due process claims challenge the procedures used by the government in effecting a deprivation of a right, whereas substantive due process claims challenge the action itself. [2] Thus, substantive due process implicates the essence of state action rather than its modalities. [3] In one commentator's formulation, [p]rocedural due process differs from substantive due process by focusing not on what a person has been deprived of, but rather on how the deprivation was accomplished. [4] The classic procedural due process case arises when the government acts to deny or curtail someone's life, liberty or property interest and defends its action by asserting that it employed fair procedures in furtherance of a legitimate governmental objective ( see, e.g., Schall v Martin, 467 US 253 [pretrial juvenile detention]; Vitek v Jones, 445 US 480 [prison to mental hospital transfer]; Addington v Texas, 441 US 418 [civil commitment]). That is not the case before us. Here, deprivation or denial is not the governmental goal. This case does not involve an attempt by the government to deprive the plaintiffs of a right that carries with it a predeprivation procedure. The government may not decide to deny a foster child's safety or entitlements and seek to justify the denial by showing that its processes or procedures were fair. No amount of procedure can justify the wrongful denial of an entitlement. Moreover, merely asserting a denial of a statutory entitlement does not make out a claim of procedural due process. As the United States Supreme Court held in Olim v Wakinekona, [p]rocess is not an end in itself (461 US 238, 250; see also, Hewitt v Helms, 459 US 460, 469). We conclude that plaintiffs have not adequately pleaded a violation of procedural due process, and that those causes of action should be dismissed. Plaintiffs also assert violations of the substantive component of the Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution. Three United States Supreme Court cases are critical to our treatment of this issue. In Estelle v Gamble (429 US 97, 104) the Court held that the State owes a duty to those whom it has placed in its custody, so that when a prisoner demonstrates that the State exhibited deliberate indifference to the prisoner's medical needs, the Constitution's guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment are violated. Although Estelle was an Eighth Amendment case, the Supreme Court has characterized the government's deliberate indifference toward the prisoner in Estelle as a violation of substantive due process ( see, DeShaney v Winnebago County Dept. of Social Servs., 489 US 189, 198, n 5, supra; Whitley v Albers, 475 US 312, 326-327). Six years later, the Supreme Court in Youngberg v Romeo (457 US 307, 315) addressed the government's obligations to a person whom it committed to a facility for the mentally retarded. The Court stressed that people who are in the State's custody are dependent on the government for their basic needs (457 US, at 324). The Supreme Court held that inasmuch as Romeo was not a prisoner, the Estelle deliberate indifference standard was inappropriate. The Court ruled that Romeoa person involuntarily committed and thereby dependent on the government for basic needswas entitled to more considerate treatment and conditions of confinement than criminals whose conditions of confinement are designed to punish (457 US, at 322). The Court stated that as to persons so confined the State owes a duty to accord such services as are necessary to insure their reasonable safety. The litigants in Romeo also agreed that the State owed a duty to provide such persons adequate food, shelter, clothing, and medical care ( Youngberg v Romeo, 457 US, at 324). In such a setting an actionable claim is made out if and when a decision by the State through its professional administrators with respect to such services is such a substantial departure from accepted professional judgment, practice, or standards as to demonstrate that the person responsible actually did not base the decision on such a judgment ( supra, 457 US, at 323). Estelle and Romeo are the two primary cases in which the Supreme Court recognized monetary damage claims based on the substantive component of the Due Process Clause. Neither involved children in foster care. Thereafter, in 1989, the United States Supreme Court decided DeShaney v Winnebago County Dept. of Social Servs. (489 US 189), the only case in which it touched upon the issue of substantive due process in the context of children in foster care. The Court held that a child who suffered harm while in the custody of his father has no claim based on the substantive component of the Due Process Clause. The Court, however, in a footnote, stated: Had the State by the affirmative exercise of its power removed [the child] from free society and placed him in a foster home operated by its agents, we might have a situation sufficiently analogous to incarceration or institutionalization to give rise to an affirmative duty to protect (489 US, at 201, n 9). The Court then cited several cases by way of illustration, but expressly disclaimed any view on the validity of that analogy. In the case before us, the original complaint was drafted before the Supreme Court decided DeShaney. It was drawn as a putative class action that included various plaintiffs, some of whom were allegedly harmed while in foster care, others while living with their parents. Plaintiffs commenced this litigation employing an array of claims designed to address numerous facets of the child welfare system and to test the availability of a host of remedies, including various forms of injunctive relief and putative class certification. The complaints had been conceived and drawn with a broad thrust that did not contemplate or take aim at the more specific and essential elements that would enable them to withstand a motion to dismiss for failure to articulate a substantive due process violation. Although the complaints are abundant with allegations relating to defendants' failure to provide plaintiffs with family social services, we are left on this appeal only with the sufficiency of the complaints insofar as they seek monetary damages. In addressing plaintiffs' claims for money damages pursuant to the substantive component of the Due Process Clause, the Appellate Division determined, and we agree, that the complaints did not meet the Estelle deliberate indifference standard. The Appellate Division, however, did not address the Romeo professional judgment standard. Even though in our view the Romeo standard is a better fit, [5] we conclude that plaintiffs have not articulated a cause of action under Romeo. In Romeo and Estelle the United States Supreme Court identified a narrow set of constitutional entitlements to basic necessities, arising out of conditions of total dependence in which the State itself had placed those institutionalized plaintiffs. Romeo and Estelle, however, do not support any substantive due process right to monetary redress for the defendants' alleged failure to provide the array of social services claimed by plaintiffs here. Moreover, the crux of the plaintiffs' complaints here is the defendants' alleged failure to provide protective and preventive services to the plaintiffs' families in order to avoid foster care placement and keep them at home in a safe environment, or to minimize their stay in foster care through family rehabilitation services, thereby expediting their return to a safe home environment. Under DeShaney, however, any substantive due process rights of foster children cannot be extended to entitlement to preventive and protective services before placement in care, or to family social services during placement. The allegations of harm or denial of needed medical or other services to the children while in foster care are very much incidental to the foregoing primary complaints that are pleaded, and since plaintiffs never articulated a violation of the Romeo standard of care, an independent claim for money damages for injuries in foster care based on such omissions cannot be implied. Considering that this Court has never had occasion to deal with the contours of the substantive component of the Due Process Clause in the context of a child welfare case, neither the parties nor the courts below had a precedential basis on which to proceed. We therefore affirm the dismissal of those claims with leave to replead.