Opinion ID: 2975223
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Direct Injury Theory of Liability

Text: “Section 1983 provides a federal cause of action for civil damages against an individual acting under color of state law who deprives another of ‘rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws.’” Jones, 438 F.3d at 689 (internal citation omitted). Here, PlaintiffsAppellants say that the Defendants-Appellees deprived them of their substantive due process rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment through their conduct leading up to an illegal drag race. In characterizing their claim as one of “direct-injury,” Plaintiffs-Appellants say that the pertinent inquiry is not whether the defendant officers’ failure to act was constitutionally infirm. Rather, they No. 06-1959 Draw, et al. v. City of Lincoln Park, et al. Page 5 argue that the Defendants-Appellees directly injured the Plaintiffs-Appellants through “grossly negligent” or “reckless” conduct that “shock[s] the conscience,” which the Supreme Court has held constitutes a constitutional violation. See County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 849 (1998). The Court agrees that the Plaintiffs-Appellants’ claim does not constitute a typical “failure to act” case. However, neither does the record support a direct injury claim. In Lewis, the Supreme Court held that police conduct may violate the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of substantive due process. Lewis, 523 U.S. at 836. To find such a constitutional injury, however, the Court held that a Plaintiff must show that the police possessed a purpose to cause harm, such that their actions were sufficiently arbitrary and reckless that they shock the conscience. Id. The police conduct alleged in the instant case, although reprehensible, does not lend itself to such a claim. Here, the defendant officers’ conduct was irresponsible. However, no evidence in the record indicates the officers intended to cause any harm through their actions or otherwise acted in a manner sufficient to transform wrongful behavior into unconstitutional conduct. The PlaintiffsAppellants attempt to circumvent this failing by arguing that the defendant officers “aided and abetted the commission of crimes i.e., drag racing and gambling, which resulted in the injuries to Appellants.” Stated otherwise, the Plaintiffs-Appellants argue that the defendant officers and the drag racers themselves engaged in a conspiracy to engage in unconstitutional conduct. The Court finds this argument unavailing for a number of reasons. First, in the conspiracy cases cited by the Plaintiffs-Appellants, such as Dwares v. City of New York, 985 F.2d 94 (2d Cir. 1993) and Meeker v. Edmundson, 415 F.3d 317 (4th Cir. 2005), the state officials at issue actively solicited or encouraged conduct by third parties that – if engaged in by a state actor – was inherently unconstitutional. For example, in Dwares, police officers indirectly precluded demonstrators from exercising their First Amendment rights by encouraging “skin heads” to assault individuals who were burning a flag. Dwares, 985 F.2d at 96. Similarly, in Meeker a government official solicited others to savagely engage in constitutionally impermissible corporal punishment of students. Meeker, 415 F.3d at 332. Here, even if the Court construes the defendant officers’ conduct as conspiratorial, there is no evidence that the goal of the purported conspiracy – the facilitation of an illegal drag race – was in and of itself unconstitutional. Although violative of Michigan law, drag racing does not implicate constitutional concerns. Second, the Plaintiffs-Appellants’ direct-injury argument ignores the fact that otherwise impermissible police conduct must truly be extraordinary in nature to qualify as “conscience shocking.” “[T]he due process guarantee does not entail a body of constitutional law imposing liability whenever someone cloaked with state authority causes harm.” 523 U.S. at 848. Rather, the “constitutional concept of conscience shocking . . . points clearly toward . . . [liability], only at the ends of the tort law’s spectrum of culpability.” Id. Here, the defendant officers stupidly encouraged third parties to engage in tortious conduct. Without question, such conduct showed incredibly poor judgment. However, the conduct in question does not meet the high threshold set out in Lewis. Accordingly, we find that the Plaintiffs-Appellants’ claims are unsupportable under a direct-injury theory of liability.