Opinion ID: 746904
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Custody Establishes the Existence of a Duty

Text: 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