Opinion ID: 152040
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Oest, Vicini and Lunn Are Entitled to Qualified Immunity

Text: Oest, Vicini and Lunn contend that they are entitled to qualified immunity, which protects government officials from liability insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). We apply a two-part test to determine whether the doctrine attaches: (1) whether the facts, taken in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, show that the defendant violated a constitutional right; and (2) whether that constitutional right was clearly established at the time of the alleged violation. Wheeler v. Lawson, 539 F.3d 629, 639 (7th Cir.2008) (citing Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151, 150 L.Ed.2d 272 (2001)). The Supreme Court has made clear that the doctrine of qualified immunity provides ample room for mistaken judgments and protects all those but the plainly incompetent and those who knowingly violate the law. Hunter v. Bryant, 502 U.S. 224, 227, 112 S.Ct. 534, 116 L.Ed.2d 589 (1991) (quoting Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 343, 106 S.Ct. 1092, 89 L.Ed.2d 271 (1986)). We have already concluded that there exists a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Vicini harbored a bias against Purvis that led to corruption of the integrity of the school's initial inquiry and the DCFS and the police department's followup investigations. Thus, the facts taken in the light most favorable to the plaintiff demonstrate that Oest, Vicini and Lunn violated a constitutional right. This raises the question whether a reasonable person in Oest, Vicini or Lunn's position would have known he was violating Purvis's clearly established federal rights in (a) knowingly allowing a biased person to play a leading role in the initial investigation, which ultimately resulted in the biased individual's threatening the suspected victim into admitting the existence of a relationship, (b) reporting the suspected crime to the police, (c) providing the police with the supposed victim's written statement, which detailed the specifics of the boy's alleged affair with the teacher, but (d) not informing the police or DCFS of the conflict of interest and that the student's statement had been provided only after the potentially biased person exerted considerable pressure, which led the student to drop his denials. Oest was not aware of the potential conflict of interest involving Vicini. It is clear therefore that a reasonable person in his situation would not have known that appointing Lunn and Vicini to investigate the veracity of the rumors would have involved a fundamentally biased process, thus violating a clearly established constitutional right. Oest is therefore entitled to qualified immunity. Despite being aware of the potential conflict of interest, Lunn and Vicini are also entitled to qualified immunity. The district court correctly observed that there was clearly established federal law at the time of reporting Purvis that fundamentally biased process is not due process. See Levenstein, 164 F.3d at 351. It was also well established that a person has a protected interest in pursuing employment in her chosen field. See Dupuy v. Samuels, 397 F.3d 493, 503-04 (7th Cir.2005). But this high-level observation is insufficiently precise for the specific circumstances in which Lunn and Vicini found themselves. There is no case law of the U.S. Courts of Appeals or Supreme Court of which we are aware that demonstrates that Purvis's constitutional rights would have been violated by reporting her to a body that would perform an independent investigation before effecting a deprivation. Although we have found that there is a genuine issue of material fact whether the ensuing investigation by the DCFS was sufficiently independent to cure any due-process deficiency, Lunn and Vicini would not have been plainly incompetent to suppose in light of our decision in Trejo that the subsequent, independent DCFS investigation would have foreclosed any constitutional violation. For this reason, we find that Lunn and Vicini are similarly entitled to qualified immunity and, hence, summary judgment. It was clearly established that due process was denied by the introduction of a fundamental conflict of interest into the investigative process. But it was not clearly established that such a procedural defect violated the Constitution if whatever conclusion eventuated was subject to confirmation and validation by a subsequent independent investigation. This distinction may be subtle, but here it is decisive.