Opinion ID: 70829
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Duncan

Text: 13 The sole constitutional right that the plaintiffs allege Duncan violated is the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition against the deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The issue before us is therefore whether, in view of what we take to be the facts for present purposes, Duncan's failure to provide an adequate rescue, or his action in barring private rescue attempts, ran afoul of a clearly established constitutional right. The district court held it did and therefore denied Duncan's motion for summary judgment. We review this question of law de novo. E.g., Swint, 51 F.3d at 994. 14 The plaintiffs concede that, absent special circumstances, individuals--even government officials--are under no duty to provide rescue. 4 However, there are times when the Constitution requires local governmental units to provide basic protective services to individuals with whom the government has created a special relationship. Bradberry, 789 F.2d at 1516 n. 2. The plaintiffs' position on the merits is that under the facts, the special relationship exception applies to impose liability on Duncan. Because Duncan's qualified immunity defense is the issue at hand, in order to prevail in this appeal the plaintiffs must convince us that any special relationship law specifically imposing liability under these factual circumstances was clearly established at the time of Hamilton's death, July 6, 1990. 15 The plaintiffs argue that a special relationship arose, imposing an affirmative constitutional duty upon Duncan, when Duncan cleared the area around Hamilton and instructed Simpson to discontinue CPR efforts, thereby implicitly taking responsibility for Hamilton. The plaintiffs rely on three cases to establish with the requisite clarity that under these circumstances a special relationship was created between Duncan and Hamilton, so that a negligent or reckless rescue attempt, or interference with a bystander's rescue attempt, violated the Constitution. 16 The first case the plaintiffs point to as clearly establishing this proposition of law is DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189, 109 S.Ct. 998, 103 L.Ed.2d 249 (1989). In DeShaney, the Supreme Court held that the government did not violate the constitutional rights of a four-year-old child, who was in the custody and control of his natural father, when his father beat him severely. The county officials had been aware that the father was abusing his child, and at one point the county had taken the child into custody after he was admitted to a local hospital with suspicious bruises and abrasions. However, the child was released to his father after only three days in protective custody. For the next six months, a county caseworker made monthly visits to the DeShaney home, during which she observed a number of suspicious injuries to the child's head. The caseworker recorded these incidents in her files. The child was admitted to the emergency room once again for injuries believed to be caused by child abuse. Still, the county officials did not take the child into custody. On the caseworker's next two visits to the DeShaney home, she was told the child was too ill to see her, and no action was taken. A few months later, DeShaney beat his child so severely that the child suffered permanent brain damage and was rendered profoundly retarded. 17 Despite repeated indications that DeShaney was abusing his child, county officials had done nothing to protect the child. Even under those egregious circumstances, the Supreme Court held that there was no violation of any constitutional duty. In so holding, the Court distinguished cases involving persons who were in custody, such as prisoners and persons committed to mental institutions, from the general public, holding that public officials have no duty to protect individuals, generally. Id. at 198-201, 109 S.Ct. at 1004-06. 18 Although DeShaney held that there was no constitutional violation in that case, the plaintiffs attempt to extract from DeShaney a clearly established rule that a state has an affirmative duty to protect people when the state imposes a limitation on the individual's freedom to act on her own behalf. But DeShaney reached no such holding, and instead held that the failure of the government actors in that case to rescue the young child from the abusive father to whom the child had been returned did not violate the Constitution. If anything, the holding in DeShaney establishes that the rule the plaintiffs seek is far from clearly established. 19 The plaintiffs also rely upon our decision in Wideman v. Shallowford Community Hospital, Inc., 826 F.2d 1030 (11th Cir.1987), which held that a county government's practice of using its emergency medical vehicles to transport patients only to hospitals that guarantee the payment of the county's medical bills does not violate any right protected by the federal Constitution. Toni Wideman, who was at the time four months pregnant, began experiencing abdominal pain. She called her obstetrician, who instructed her to come immediately to Piedmont Hospital. Wideman called the 911 emergency telephone number and requested an ambulance to take her to Piedmont. Wideman asked the Emergency Medical Service employees who responded to her call to take her to Piedmont where her doctor was waiting, but because of the county's policy they refused and instead took Wideman against her wishes to a different hospital. The attending physician at that hospital spoke by phone to Wideman's obstetrician at Piedmont and, after a substantial delay, Wideman was transferred to Piedmont. At that point, however, Wideman's obstetrician was unable to stop her labor, and Wideman gave birth to a premature baby, who survived for only four hours. Id. at 1031. 20 The Wideman Court held that the county's practice of transporting emergency patients only to certain hospitals did not violate the Constitution. Id. at 1036. In so holding, the Court discussed at some length the special relationship cases. Quoting from a Seventh Circuit decision, the Court observed that  '[t]he contours of what constitutes a special relationship between a municipality, acting through its officials, and its citizens are hazy and indistinct.'  826 F.2d at 1035 (quoting Ellsworth v. City of Racine, 774 F.2d 182, 185 (7th Cir.1985), cert. denied, 475 U.S. 1047, 106 S.Ct. 1265, 89 L.Ed.2d 574 (1986)). The Court went on to state: It is possible, however, to discern certain general guidelines regarding the existence of such a right-duty relationship, and then observed that [t]he primary thread weaving these special relationship cases together is the notion that if the state takes a person into custody ... or assumes responsibility for that person's welfare, a 'special relationship' may be created in respect of that person. Id. The only example given was in the prison context. The Wideman Court stated that a constitutional duty can arise only when a state or municipality, by exercising a significant degree of custody or control over an individual, places that person in a worse situation than he would have been had the government not acted at all. Id. Then came the following statement, upon which the plaintiffs in this case place much emphasis: Such a situation could arise by virtue of the state affirmatively placing an individual in a position of danger, effectively stripping a person of her ability to defend herself, or cutting off potential sources of private aid. Id. 21 Those passages from Wideman are clearly dicta, because they were in no way essential to Wideman 's holding of no liability. The law cannot be established by dicta. Dicta is particularly unhelpful in qualified immunity cases where we seek to identify clearly established law. See, e.g., Jones v. White, 992 F.2d 1548, 1566 (11th Cir.) ([F]or law-of-the-circuit purposes ... [the review of any precedent] ought to focus far more on the judicial decision than on the judicial opinion. (citation and quotation marks omitted) (alterations in original)), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 114 S.Ct. 448, 126 L.Ed.2d 381 (1993). 22 The district court thought that the Wideman case clearly established that Duncan's actions in this case violated Hamilton's constitutional rights. The district court drew from Wideman the general proposition that a constitutional duty can arise when a state or municipality exercises a significant degree of custody or control over an individual and places that individual in a worse situation than if the government had not acted at all. 5 The Wideman Court said that such a situation could arise if the government affirmatively placed an individual in a position of danger or cut off potential sources of private aid; but the Wideman opinion itself characterized those statements as only general guidelines. 826 F.2d at 1035. Moreover, the general propositions discussed in Wideman had little to do with the facts of that case, which in turn are not sufficiently similar to the facts of this case. See Rodgers v. Horsley, 39 F.3d 308, 311 (11th Cir.1994) (the question in this case, as in all qualified immunity cases, is fact specific); Adams v. St. Lucie County Sheriff's Dep't., 962 F.2d 1563, 1575 (11th Cir.1992) (Edmondson, J., dissenting) (The facts need not be the same as the facts of the immediate case. But they do need to be materially similar.), approved en banc, 998 F.2d 923 (11th Cir.1993). In short, the district court relied upon dicta from Wideman as having clearly established the law, something that dicta cannot do. 23 Finally, the plaintiffs rely upon our holding in Cornelius v. Town of Highland Lake, 880 F.2d 348 (11th Cir.1989), cert. denied, 494 U.S. 1066, 110 S.Ct. 1784, 108 L.Ed.2d 785 (1990). In that decision we held that a town could have violated the constitutional rights of a town employee when it placed work release inmates in close proximity to the employee who had no choice, if she wanted to keep her job, but to continue working around the inmates. Id. at 356. Cornelius did not involve any rescue-type situation. Its facts are far removed from the present case. 6 We held in Lassiter that, [f]or the law to be clearly established to the point that qualified immunity does not apply, the law must have earlier been developed in such a concrete and factually defined context to make it obvious to all reasonable government actors, in the defendant's place, that 'what he is doing' violates federal law. 28 F.3d at 1149. Cornelius did not develop the law in the context of a law enforcement officer failing to provide competent rescue services or interrupting a bystander's rescue efforts. Consequently, it cannot have clearly established the law applicable to the present case. 24 In summary, the three cases that the plaintiffs rely upon did not develop the law plaintiffs assert in a sufficiently concrete and factually defined context to serve as the basis for the denial of qualified immunity in this case. The concrete and factually defined contexts of those three cases make them distinguishable from this one. 7 We said in Lassiter that the most common error we encounter in qualified immunity cases involves the point that courts must not permit plaintiffs to discharge their burden by referring to general rules and to the violation of abstract 'rights.'  Id. at 1150. We emphasized that [g]eneral propositions have little to do with the concept of qualified immunity and that the facts of a case relied upon to clearly establish the law must be materially similar, because [p]ublic officials are not obligated to be creative or imaginative in drawing analogies from previously decided cases. Id. (citation and quotation marks omitted). It would take much creativity and imagination to glean from the factually distinguishable cases upon which the plaintiffs rely a clearly established rule of law that an unsuccessful, negligent, or reckless rescue attempt, or interference with a bystander's rescue attempt, amounts to a constitutional violation. We decline to exercise such creativity and imagination, because qualified immunity doctrine prohibits it. 25 The district court should have granted Duncan's motion for summary judgment in his individual capacity on qualified immunity grounds.