Opinion ID: 706008
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: DeShaney

Text: 14 In DeShaney, the Court held that due process did not require the state to protect a child from the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. Joshua DeShaney had repeatedly been taken to the local emergency room with injuries that physicians suspected were due to physical abuse. At one point Joshua was temporarily placed in the custody of the hospital while a Child Protection Team evaluated his situation; however, the Team determined there was insufficient evidence that he was being abused to retain custody. Joshua was returned to his father's custody and, despite subsequent hospital admissions for injuries indicative of abuse, local officials failed to intervene. Ultimately, his father beat Joshua so severely that he was expected to spend the remainder of his life in an institution for the profoundly retarded. 15 Despite the fact that local officials had suspected ongoing abuse, the Court rejected the contention that they had deprived Joshua of his liberty in violation of due process by taking no action: 16 [N]othing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors. The Clause is phrased as a limitation on the State's power to act, not as a guarantee of certain minimal levels of safety and security. It forbids the State itself to deprive individuals of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, but its language cannot fairly be extended to impose an affirmative obligation on the State to ensure that those interests do not come to harm through other means. Nor does history support such an expansive reading of the constitutional text.... Its purpose was to protect the people from the State, not to ensure that the State protected them from each other. The Framers were content to leave the extent of governmental obligation in the latter area to the democratic political processes. 17 489 U.S. at 195-96, 109 S.Ct. at 1003. 18 The Court acknowledged that in certain limited circumstances the Constitution imposes upon the State affirmative duties of care and protection with respect to particular individuals. 489 U.S. at 198, 109 S.Ct. at 1004. Thus, when someone is incarcerated, the Eighth Amendment (via the Fourteenth) requires the State to provide him with adequate medical care. Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 97 S.Ct. 285, 50 L.Ed.2d 251 (1976). Similarly, substantive due process compels the State to take reasonable steps to ensure the safety of individuals involuntarily committed to its mental facilities. Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 102 S.Ct. 2452, 73 L.Ed.2d 28 (1982). 19 But these cases afford petitioners no help. Taken together, they stand only for the proposition that when the State takes a person into its custody and hold him there against his will, the Constitution imposes upon it a corresponding duty to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being. The rationale for this principle is simple enough: when the State by the affirmative exercise of its power so restrains an individual's liberty that it renders him unable to care for himself, and at the same time fails to provide for his basic human needs--e.g., food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and reasonable safety--it transgresses the substantive limits on state action set by the Eighth Amendment and the Due Process Clause. 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 individuals'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. 20 The Estelle- Youngberg analysis simply has no applicability in the present case. Petitioners concede that the harms Joshua suffered occurred not while he was in the State's custody, but while he was in the custody of his natural father, who was in no sense a state actor. 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. That the State took temporary custody of Joshua does not alter the analysis, for when it returned him to his father's custody, it placed him in no worse position than that in which he would have been had it not acted at all; the State does not become the permanent guarantor of an individuals's safety by having once offered him shelter. Under these circumstances, the State had no constitutional duty to protect Joshua. 21 489 U.S. at 199-201, 109 S.Ct. at 1005-06 (footnotes and citations omitted). 22