Opinion ID: 746904
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Black's Substantive Due Process Claim

Text: 30 We turn now to the merits of Black's claim against the individual officers. She alleges that the officers violated her right to substantive due process 10 under the Fourteenth Amendment by forcing her to leave the scene of the police stop in Kritis's truck. In other words, her claim is that the officers deprived her of her liberty (and, ultimately, her life) without due process of law by threatening to arrest her if she did not leave with Kritis, and by physically placing her against her will in his truck. Because Black seeks to hold the officers liable in their individual capacities under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, she must show not only that the officers' actions were unconstitutional, but also that they should have known at that time that they were violating her rights. [G]overnment officials performing discretionary functions generally are shielded from liability for civil damages 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, 2738, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). 31 It is not necessary that the very action have been previously held unlawful but, given the preexisting law, the unlawfulness of the conduct must have been apparent. In determining whether an official is entitled to qualified immunity, this court asks whether the law was clearly established at the time of the alleged action. 32 Barton v. Norrod, 106 F.3d 1289, 1293 (6th Cir.1997) (citation omitted). In determining whether the officers should have known in February 1994 that their actions were unlawful, we look primarily to decisions of the Supreme Court, this court, and other courts within our circuit. See Cagle v. Gilley, 957 F.2d 1347, 1348 (6th Cir.1992). 33 We review the district court's determination that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity de novo. See Barton, 106 F.3d at 1293. In the present case, the district court reviewed the relevant case law dealing with claims that state actors violated substantive due process by allowing individuals to become subject to an indirect harm, and found much of that law to be confused and in conflict. It then appeared to reason that, since the doctrine of substantive due process was unclear in its entirety, no such claim could ever survive a motion to dismiss on the ground of qualified immunity: This inquiry shows that the law in this area is unclear and that not only would no reasonable police officer have known what duty was owed to the plaintiff under the facts alleged in this case, but even the Supreme Court is uncertain on the matter. Chipman v. City of Florence, 858 F.Supp. 87, 90 (E.D.Ky.1994) (citing DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dep't of Soc. Servs., 489 U.S. 189, 199, 109 S.Ct. 998, 1005, 103 L.Ed.2d 249 (1989)) (dismissing complaint); see also Chipman v. City of Florence, 866 F.Supp. 332, 335 (E.D.Ky.1994) (denying motion for reconsideration). 34 This was error. While, as we will see below, there is a good deal of uncertainty with regard to the precise contours of substantive due process, it does not follow that state actors are insulated from liability on all such claims, no matter what the underlying facts may be. The fact that the law may have been unclear, or even hotly disputed, at the margins does not afford state actors immunity from suit where their actions violate the heartland of the constitutional guarantee, as that guarantee was understood at the time of the violation. 11 Stated differently, it is simply irrelevant that the definition of the right to substantive due process has been in flux if, under any definition found in the case law at the time, the defendants should have known in February 1994 that their actions violated that right. 35
36 We therefore proceed to determine whether the individual officers violated law that was clearly established in February 1994 when they forced Black into Kritis's truck. When, as here, a plaintiff alleges that state actors violated substantive due process by placing her at risk of harm from a third party, the court is presented with two distinct, though interrelated inquiries. First, in order to find for the plaintiff, the court must conclude that the plaintiff and the state actors had a sufficiently direct relationship such that the defendants owed her a duty not to subject her to danger. Second, the court must also conclude that the officers were sufficiently culpable to be liable under a substantive due process theory. 37 With respect to the first question, while the state does not owe its citizens a constitutional duty to keep them from harm in all circumstances, it has been clearly established that such a duty will arise when the state has acted to deprive an individual of certain indicia of liberty: 38 The affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State's knowledge of the individual's predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf. In the substantive due process analysis, it is the State's affirmative act of restraining the individual's freedom to act on his own behalf--through incarceration, institutionalization, or other similar restraint of personal liberty--which is the deprivation of liberty triggering the protections of the Due Process Clause, not its failure to act to protect his liberty interests against harms inflicted by other means. 39 DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dep't of Soc. Servs., 489 U.S. 189, 200, 109 S.Ct. 998, 1005, 103 L.Ed.2d 249 (1989) (citation omitted); see also Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 315-16, 102 S.Ct. 2452, 2457-58, 73 L.Ed.2d 28 (1982) (involuntarily committed mental patients have substantive due process right, analogous to Eighth Amendment right of prisoners, to protection from harm). In the present case, Black's complaint alleges--and the record evidence could reasonably be read to show--that the officers threatened to arrest her if she did not leave in Kritis's truck, and they physically lifted her out of Stemler's car and placed her in the truck against her will. In so doing, the officers took the affirmative act of restraining [Black's] freedom to act on her [own] behalf, and consequently imposed upon themselves a duty to ensure that they were not placing her in danger. Their actions were, in the words of DeShaney, a restraint on Black's personal liberty, not a failure to act on her behalf. See also Collins v. City of Harker Heights, 503 U.S. 115, 127, 112 S.Ct. 1061, 1069, 117 L.Ed.2d 261 (1992). 40 The defendants rely on Foy v. City of Berea, 58 F.3d 227 (6th Cir.1995), to argue that they did not infringe Black's liberty. In Foy, the plaintiff had been drinking in a dormitory with his friends. After receiving a complaint, the police came to the dormitory and told them, Get in your car and get out of here or somebody is getting arrested. Although the police had told them only to leave the premises, the plaintiff and his friends then decided to take a lengthy drive from Berea, Kentucky, to Crestline, Ohio. Forty-five minutes into that journey, the driver crashed the car, killing Foy. This court held that the defendant police officers had not violated Foy's right to substantive due process, since there was no restraint on his liberty that had caused him to keep driving. Id. at 230. The defendants also rely on Walton v. City of Southfield, 995 F.2d 1331 (6th Cir.1993). In Walton, we held that police officers who had arrested the driver of a car, and who had abandoned in a nearby building the children (ages 15 and 2) who were the passengers of that car--but who had never taken the children into their custody--were entitled to qualified immunity from a substantive due process challenge. 41 Neither case is apposite. In the present case, Black was rendered unable to protect herself by virtue of both the threat of arrest and her physical placement in the truck by the officers. Unlike Foy, Black never had the opportunity to make a voluntary choice to continue driving with Kritis beyond the span of time that the police had in effect ordered her to do so; her fatal accident occurred about five minutes after the truck left the police stop. Furthermore, unlike Walton, Black was in the custody of the defendant officers in the sense that they had affirmatively acted to deprive her of her liberty, rather than merely negligently refused to act to protect her. See Walton, 995 F.2d at 1336-37. In sum, neither Foy nor Walton did anything to alter the clear and simple rule that state actors owe a duty of care to those individuals of whom they deprive their liberty, and a reasonable jury could conclude that the officers had deprived Black of her liberty by placing her in the truck or by threatening her with an arrest that would have been unwarranted under Kentucky law. See Ky.Rev.Stat. § 222.202 (offense of public intoxication involves drinking in public or endangering one's self, other persons, or property). 42 While it is clear that the state owes a duty of care to an individual who has suffered a deprivation of liberty by the state--e.g., an individual who has been in the state's custody--there is also dicta in DeShaney that suggests that the state may also owe a duty to individuals in non-custodial settings: 43 While the State may have been aware of the dangers that Joshua faced in the free world, it played no part in their creation, nor did it do anything to render him any more vulnerable to them. 44 489 U.S. at 201, 109 S.Ct. at 1006. A number of courts have relied on this language to hold that the state may owe an individual a duty of care under substantive due process, even if the individual is not in the state's custody, if the state has created a risk of harm to the individual. See Kneipp v. Tedder, 95 F.3d 1199, 1206-09 (3d Cir.1996) (collecting cases). Our court has suggested in dicta that DeShaney stands for the proposition that a duty to protect can arise in a noncustodial setting if the state does anything to render an individual more vulnerable to danger. Gazette v. City of Pontiac, 41 F.3d 1061, 1065 (6th Cir.1994). The defendants argue that this rule was not clearly established in February of 1994, and remains unclear today. We need not opine as to the circumstances under which a substantive due process claim in a non-custodial setting is possible, or as to whether that possibility had been clearly established in 1994. Under any definition of the term, Black was in the defendant officers' custody at the time she was forced into Kritis's truck. Because we, unlike the district court, believe that any uncertainty at the margins of the DeShaney test is not relevant to Black's claim, we hold that the defendants should have known under clearly established law that they owed Black a duty not to force her into harm's way. 45
Deliberate Indifference to Her Fate 46 Our holding that the officers owed Black a duty of care does not end our inquiry, for we also must determine what duty of care they owed, and whether they breached that duty. Over the last decade, the Supreme Court and this court have gradually defined the level of culpability with which a state defendant must act in order to be held liable for a violation of substantive due process. In Daniels v. Williams, 474 U.S. 327, 334 n. 3, 106 S.Ct. 662, 666 n. 3, 88 L.Ed.2d 662(1986), the Supreme Court held that an allegation of simple negligence would not be sufficient to support a due process claim, but reserved judgment as to whether an allegation of gross negligence would suffice. In Nishiyama v. Dickson County, 814 F.2d 277 (6th Cir.1987) (en banc), this court answered that reserved question in the affirmative. In that case, the plaintiff had been killed by an inmate who stopped her by using a patrol car that he had been allowed to use by county officials despite repeated warnings. We held that the plaintiff had stated a substantive due process claim: 47 [T]he allegation in the present complaint of gross negligence on the part of the defendants was sufficient to charge them with arbitrary use of government power... .... [A] person may be said to act in such a way as to trigger a section 1983 claim if he intentionally does something unreasonable with disregard to a known risk or a risk so obvious that he must be assumed to have been aware of it, and of a magnitude such that it is highly probable that harm will follow. 48 Id. at 282. 49 This aspect of Nishiyama has since been further refined. In Lewellen v. Metropolitan Gov't of Nashville & Davidson County, 34 F.3d 345 (6th Cir.1994)--a case decided after the defendant officers forced Black into Kritis's car--we held that, with respect to non-custodial cases, Nishiyama was no longer an accurate statement of the law after DeShaney and Collins v. City of Harker Heights, 503 U.S. 115, 112 S.Ct. 1061, 117 L.Ed.2d 261 (1992). In holding that a school board's negligence in building a school too close to a power line was not actionable under § 1983, we set forth a new test: What seems to be required is an intentional infliction of injury ... or some other governmental action that is 'arbitrary in the constitutional sense.'  Lewellen, 34 F.3d at 351 (quoting Collins, 503 U.S. at 129, 112 S.Ct. at 1071); see also Gazette, 41 F.3d at 1067 (gross negligence is not actionable under substantive due process). We also expressed doubt as to whether even deliberate indifference by state actors could give rise to a substantive due process claim by a plaintiff who was not in the custody of the state. Lewellen, 34 F.3d at 350 n. 4. 50 Of course, the phrase arbitrary in the constitutional sense is not self-defining; indeed, in Collins, the only elucidation that the Supreme Court provided for that phrase was a reference to the old chestnut of substantive due process claims, conscience shocking. 503 U.S. at 128, 112 S.Ct. at 1070. The defendants' argument is essentially that Black's claim fails the test of Lewellen and Collins because there is no law now, nor was there in 1994, clearly specifying any area of liability under substantive due process. In essence, they argue that there is no clearly established law holding that they have any duty to persons in their custody. As they conceded at oral argument, under their theory, they would not be liable even if they physically carried Black to the middle of a busy highway and left her there. However, Collins carefully noted that its holding was limited to those cases where a plaintiff was not in the custody of the state, and specifically reaffirmed the established law that the state is required to take care to protect persons in its custody from danger. See Collins, 503 U.S. at 127, 112 S.Ct. at 1069; see also Lewellen, 34 F.3d at 350 n. 4. Since, as we have held above, viewing the facts in her favor, Black was in the defendants' custody at the time that they forced her into Kritis's truck, they owed her a duty not to endanger her safety. 51 In cases such as this one, where the plaintiff suffered injury as a result of being placed in the state's custody, it has consistently and uncontroversially been the rule that a constitutional claim arises where the injury occurred as a result of the state's deliberate indifference to the risk of such an injury. See Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 834, 114 S.Ct. 1970, 1977, 128 L.Ed.2d 811 (1994); Wilson v. Seiter, 501 U.S. 294, 303, 111 S.Ct. 2321, 2326-27, 115 L.Ed.2d 271 (1991); Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 106, 97 S.Ct. 285, 292, 50 L.Ed.2d 251 (1976). Although each of these cases involved an Eighth Amendment claim raised by a prisoner, we have consistently held that at least the same standard applies to substantive due process claims raised by other persons in the custody of the state. See Durham v. Nu'Man, 97 F.3d 862, 869 (6th Cir.1996) (patient at state mental hospital), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 1337, 137 L.Ed.2d 496 (1997); Lintz v. Skipski, 25 F.3d 304, 306 (6th Cir.1994) (children in state foster home); Heflin v. Stewart County, 958 F.2d 709, 713-14 (6th Cir.1992) (pretrial detainee); Meador v. Cabinet of Human Resources, 902 F.2d 474, 476 (6th Cir.1990) (children in state foster home). While Lewellen may have declared that the range of culpable conduct is narrower in cases where the plaintiff is not in the state's custody, it did nothing to change the standard of deliberate indifference in cases involving a custodial relationship. See Foy, 58 F.3d at 232 (noting distinction). In cases in which a plaintiff alleges an injury arising out of the state's custody over her, the deliberate indifference test ensures that injuries arising out of truly arbitrary governmental action are compensated, while at the same time avoiding the imposition on to the states of a broad, federalized system of tort law. We therefore re-affirm the application of that test today. 52 We again note that the district court erred in holding that the entire field of substantive due process law regarding state liability for indirect injury was not clearly established in 1994. See Chipman, 858 F.Supp. at 90. Although the discussion above reveals that there is obviously considerable uncertainty at the margin, the core principle that the state must not act with deliberate indifference to the risk of injury to persons in its custody is well-established. In the present case, we believe that Black's complaint, as well as the record evidence read in the light most favorable to her, supports a claim that the defendant officers acted with deliberate indifference to the threat of injury to her. They knew, or reasonably should have known, that Kritis was unfit to drive. They knew, or reasonably should have known, that Kritis had assaulted her earlier in the evening and had threatened to hurt her. Nevertheless, they chose to act affirmatively to place her in harm's way. 53 The very notion that police officers should not have known that they could not force an incapacitated woman to drive off with an obviously drunk man who they had reason to believe had beaten her betrays a chilling and unacceptable vision of the role of the police in our society. In short, these facts support a substantive due process claim under law that was clearly established in 1994, and we are therefore obliged to reverse the dismissal of her complaint against the individual officers. 12 54