Opinion ID: 2605
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Arar's Pleading of a Substantive Due Process Violation

Text: Principles of substantive due process apply only to a narrow band of extreme misbehavior by government agents acting under color of law: mistreatment of a person that is so egregious, so outrageous, that it may fairly be said to shock the contemporary conscience. Lombardi v. Whitman, 485 F.3d 73, 79 (2d Cir.2007) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). When Arar's complaint is read to include all of the actions allegedly taken by the defendants against him within this country, including the actions taken to send him to Syria with the intent that he be tortured there, it alleges conduct that easily exceeds the level of outrageousness needed to make out a due process claim. Indeed, although the shocks the conscience test is undeniably vague, see Estate of Smith v. Marasco, 430 F.3d 140, 156 (3d Cir.2005); Schaefer v. Goch, 153 F.3d 793, 798 (7th Cir.1998), [n]o one doubts that under Supreme Court precedent, interrogation by torture meets that test, Harbury v. Deutch, 233 F.3d 596, 602 (D.C.Cir.2000), rev'd on other grounds, 536 U.S. 403, 122 S.Ct. 2179, 153 L.Ed.2d 413 (2002); [18] see also Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 172, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952) (interrogation methods were too close to the rack and the screw to permit of constitutional differentiation); Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 326, 58 S.Ct. 149, 82 L.Ed. 288 (1937) (noting that the Due Process Clause must at least give protection against torture, physical or mental), overruled on other grounds by Benton v. Maryland, 395 U.S. 784, 89 S.Ct. 2056, 23 L.Ed.2d 707 (1969). The defendants did not themselves torture Arar; they outsourced it. [19] But I do not think that whether the defendants violated Arar's Fifth Amendment rights turns on whom they selected to do the torturing: themselves, a Syrian Intelligence officer, a warlord in Somalia, a drug cartel in Colombia, a military contractor in Baghdad or Boston, a Mafia family in New Jersey, or a Crip set in South Los Angeles. We have held that under the state-created danger doctrine, [w]here a government official takes an affirmative act that creates an opportunity for a third party to harm a victim (or increases the risk of such harm), the government official can potentially be liable for damages. Lombardi, 485 F.3d at 80; see also, e.g., Dwares v. City of New York, 985 F.2d 94, 98-99 (2d Cir.1993) (finding liability where the police allegedly gave the green light for skinheads to assault a group of flag-burners), overruled on other grounds by Leatherman v. Tarrant County Narcotics Intelligence & Coordination Unit, 507 U.S. 163, 164, 113 S.Ct. 1160, 122 L.Ed.2d 517 (1993); see also Velez-Diaz v. Vega-Irizarry, 421 F.3d 71, 79 (1st Cir.2005) ([I]n scenarios in which government officials actively direct or assist private actors in causing harm to an individual ... the government officials and the private actor are essentially joint tortfeasors, and therefore, may incur shared constitutional responsibility. (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)). We have also held that when the State takes a person into its custody and holds him there against his will, the Constitution imposes upon it a corresponding duty to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being. Under these limited circumstances, the state may owe the incarcerated person an affirmative duty to protect against harms to his liberties inflicted by third parties. Matican v. City of New York, 524 F.3d 151, 155-56 (2d Cir.2008) (citations, internal quotation marks, and footnotes omitted). This duty arises solely from 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. Id. [20] The majority reaches the wrong conclusion in large measure, I think, by treating Arar's claims as though he were an unadmitted alien seeking entry into the United States. The majority asserts that [a]s an unadmitted alien, Arar as a matter of law lacked a physical presence in the United States. Ante at 186. And it concludes from this that the full protections of the due process clause do not apply to Arar because they apply only to `persons within the United States.' Id. (quoting Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 693, 121 S.Ct. 2491, 150 L.Ed.2d 653 (2001) (internal quotation marks omitted)). But the notion that, while in New York City, Arar was not physically present in the United States, is a legal fiction peculiar to immigration law. It is relevant only to the determination of an alien's immigration status and related matters. It is indeed a fiction that works largely to the benefit of aliens, permitting them to remain here while immigration officials determine whether they are legally admissible. If Arar had been seeking to immigrate to the United States, [21] had he been detained at the immigration entry point at JFK Airport; had he thereafter been held at the MDC in Brooklyn pending deportation to his home in Canada, he presumably would have properly been treated, for immigration purposes, as though he had been held or turned back at the border. See Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 215, 73 S.Ct. 625, 97 L.Ed. 956 (1953) (Aliens seeking entry obviously can be turned back at the border without more.... [T]emporary harborage, an act of legislative grace, bestows no additional rights.); Kaplan v. Tod, 267 U.S. 228, 230, 45 S.Ct. 257, 69 L.Ed. 585 (1925) (concluding that an unadmitted alien held on Ellis Island, and later elsewhere within the United States, was to be regarded as stopped at the boundary line for naturalization purposes). But for purposes of assessing his treatment by law enforcement agents during his detention and interrogation in several places in the City of New York, it cannot follow from a legal fiction applicable to immigration status that Arar, rather like the fictional little man who wasn't there, [22] was never in this country. [23] Arar sought not to enter this country, but to leave it, after transiting briefly through one of its airports. For purposes of identifying the most rudimentary of his rights under the Constitution, the fiction that Arar was not here is senseless. He was here, as a matter of both fact and law, and was therefore entitled to protection against mistreatment under the Due Process Clause.