Opinion ID: 589625
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: State Created Danger

Text: 45 We come to plaintiffs' second basis for their constitutional claim, viz., that the school defendants created the danger that eventuated in a violation of plaintiffs' constitutional rights. Plaintiffs' counsel asserts that this claim exists apart from the claim based on the compulsory attendance law and applies to both plaintiffs. We now address that claim. 46 We understand plaintiffs' amended complaints, their briefs and the oral assertions of their counsel to advance a claim that the school defendants imperiled plaintiffs, or increased their risks of harm, by: (1) failing to report to the parents or other authorities the misconduct resulting in abuse to plaintiffs; (2) placing the class under the control of an inadequately trained and supervised student teacher; (3) failing to demand proper conduct of the student defendants; and (4) failing to investigate and put a stop to the physical and sexual misconduct. Plaintiffs say that these acts or omissions created a climate which facilitated sexual and physical abuse of students. L.H.'s Amended Complaint, App. at 58. Thus, they assert that having placed plaintiffs in the situation alleged, the school defendants were obligated to protect them from violations of their personal bodily integrity by other students who were also under such defendants' control. 47 The state-created danger theory, utilized to find a constitutional tort duty under § 1983 outside of a strictly custodial context, has been recognized by several courts of appeals. 11 Cornelius v. Town of Highland Lake, 880 F.2d 348 (11th Cir.1989); Wood v. Ostrander, 879 F.2d 583 (9th Cir.1989), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 111 S.Ct. 341, 112 L.Ed.2d 305 (1990); Jackson v. City of Joliet, 715 F.2d 1200, 1204 (7th Cir.1983). After determining in DeShaney that there was no Estelle- Youngberg type custody there giving rise to an affirmative duty of protection, the Court commented that [w]hile 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 more vulnerable to them. DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 201, 109 S.Ct. at 1006 (emphasis added). 48 Post-DeShaney courts have tracked the quoted Supreme Court's language by asking whether the state actors involved affirmatively acted to create plaintiff's danger, or to render him or her more vulnerable to it. See e.g., Bryson v. City of Edmond, 905 F.2d 1386, 1392 (10th Cir.1990) (declining to impose liability upon state for deaths of post office employees shot by fellow worker where responding police did not create the dangerous situation nor act to worsen decedents' plights). We turn to Third Circuit case law in this area. 49 In Brown v. Grabowski, 922 F.2d 1097 (3d Cir.1990), this court considered the state-created danger theory as enunciated in Wood and Cornelius. There, the plaintiff's decedent reported to the police that her former boyfriend had held her hostage, threatened her, and sexually assaulted her for three days. The police did not place her abductor under arrest, and failed to inform her of her right to request a temporary restraining order under New Jersey's Prevention of Domestic Violence Act. N.J.Stat.Ann. § 2C:25-7 (1982). She was subsequently found dead in the trunk of her abductor's car. This court distinguished the state officials' actions in Brown from those in Wood and Cornelius where the courts found affirmative constitutional duties of protection. Brown, 922 F.2d at 1114-17. Ultimately, the court concluded that, [i]n contrast to the plaintiff in Wood, [plaintiff] has supplied no evidence that [the state actors] acted to create or to exacerbate the danger that [the abductor] posed to [her], thereby triggering a possible constitutional duty to assist her in gaining access to the civil courts. Id. at 1116. 50 Plaintiffs here also rely upon Wood and Cornelius to demonstrate the use of the state-created danger theory to impose liability under § 1983. In addition, they cite Swader v. Virginia, 743 F.Supp. 434 (E.D.Va.1990), Horton v. Flenory, 889 F.2d 454 (3d Cir.1989), and Germany v. Vance, 868 F.2d 9 (1st Cir.1989). As in Brown, however, the facts alleged in plaintiffs' amended complaints differ in important respects from those in the state-created danger line of cases. 51 Liability under the state-created danger theory is predicated upon the states' affirmative acts which work to plaintiffs' detriments in terms of exposure to danger. As the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit commented: 52 We do not want to pretend that the line between action and inaction, between inflicting and failing to prevent the infliction of harm, is clearer than it is. If the state puts a man in a position of danger from private persons and then fails to protect him, it will not be heard to say that its role was merely passive; it is as much an active tortfeasor as if it had thrown him into a snake pit. 53 Bowers v. DeVito, 686 F.2d 616, 618 (7th Cir.1982). Although we find this to be an extremely close case, and certainly a tragedy, we are convinced that the school defendants did not create plaintiffs' peril, increase their risks of harm, or act to render them more vulnerable to the student defendants' assaults. 54 In Wood, the police officer arrested an intoxicated driver and impounded the vehicle leaving the driver's female passenger in a neighborhood known for criminal activity at night without any means to travel to a place of safety. The woman was raped by a stranger who offered to take her home. In Cornelius, the state prison officials and local officers instituted a prisoner work program which permitted inmates to work in public areas with access to dangerous weapons under the general supervision of an untrained city employee. Although the authorities represented to the public that only property offenders would be assigned to the work crews, the state permitted a prisoner with a violent criminal history to work in the town hall where plaintiff was employed. This prisoner abducted plaintiff at knife-point and held her hostage for three days, subjecting her to repeated threats of physical and sexual abuse. Finally, in Swader, officials permitted a prisoner serving a life sentence for rape to work unsupervised outside the prison gates, but still on prison property. This prisoner raped and killed the daughter of a prison employee who was required by her employment to reside on the complex grounds. 55 In each of these cited cases, the state can fairly be said to have affirmatively acted to create the danger to the victims. The school defendants' acts in assigning student teacher Peters to the graphic acts class and failing to supervise her more closely, as well as their failure to put a stop to the non-sexual pandemonium may have created a recognizable risk that plaintiffs would receive little education in that class, and perhaps, physical injury due to the roughhousing. Plaintiffs did not suffer harm, however, from that kind of foreseeable risk. See Williamson v. City of Virginia Beach, Va., 786 F.Supp. 1238, 1253 (E.D.Va.1992) (no § 1983 liability for minor informant's suicide due to stress of receiving threats where recognized risk is retaliation against the informant or his family). Plaintiffs' harm came about solely through the acts of private persons without the level of intermingling of state conduct with private violence that supported liability in Wood, Swader and Cornelius. 56 We now turn to the final two cases cited by plaintiffs to support their theory of state-created danger. In Horton, the owner of a private club, a retired police officer known for his violence, believed an employee to be responsible for the burglarization of the club. He interrogated the employee and summoned the police. Sergeant Dlubak, who responded to the call, also questioned the employee, but refused to remove him from the owner's premises notwithstanding signs of physical mistreatment. This court imposed liability upon the state holding that [c]learly, Sgt. Dlubak was a participant in the custody which led to the victim's death. Id. at 458. 57 In Germany, plaintiff, a minor, was committed to the custody of the state based upon a charge of assault and battery upon her father. The court held the state liable under § 1983 for its failure to reveal an admission obtained after the delinquency proceedings that plaintiff's parents had fabricated the assault charge to obtain state services for their daughter. The state's failure to disclose the information resulted in continued state custody via foster homes and other placements, after the grounds for the delinquency charges had dissipated. 58 We believe that plaintiffs' reliance on Horton and Germany to support their theory of state-created danger is misplaced since we read both cases to turn upon a finding of functional custody. Moreover, the school defendants here, unlike the state officials in Horton and Germany, are not alleged to have encouraged or implicitly authorized the violations by bestowing on the student defendants any authority under color of law. In both cited cases, the states' acts in withholding vital information served to increase the risks of harm by permitting continued custody with the states' imprimatur. 59 Plaintiffs also allege that the acts of the School Defendants ... in setting up the graphic arts classroom, and the unisex bathroom, demonstrates a custom, policy or practice of ... indifference to and the failure to protect [plaintiffs'] rights. L.H.'s Amended Complaint, App. at 263 (emphasis added). The allegation seems to be made to support a contention that the state created or increased plaintiffs' danger. 60 We do not believe, however, that the state can be said to have created or increased plaintiffs' risk of danger by constructing and maintaining the graphic arts classroom with its particular physical layout. Bathrooms generally are equipped with inside locks for privacy purposes and obviously, the room was not intended to be used by both sexes at the same time. The same conduct could have occurred had the school built separate bathrooms for its male and female students. As for the darkroom, it must by definition be closed off from the main classroom in order to serve its function. The existence of the darkroom and of a single restroom, both contained within the high school classroom, did not subject plaintiffs to an inherently dangerous environment. Compare White v. Rochford, 592 F.2d 381, 384-85 (7th Cir.1979) (children left in car on side of busy highway after state officer arrested the driver). 61 Plaintiffs also argue that school defendants increased their risks of harm by failing to report the abuse to plaintiffs' parents or other authorities. This argument stems in part from their assertion that defendants are under a state imposed duty to report abuse pursuant to 23 P.C.S.A. §§ 6311 and 6312 (1991). It is clear, however, that a violation of a state law duty, by itself, is insufficient to state a § 1983 claim. Brown, 922 F.2d at 1113 (citing Maine v. Thiboutot, 448 U.S. 1, 100 S.Ct. 2502, 65 L.Ed.2d 555 (1980)). Section 1983 liability arises only from a violation of federal statutory or constitutional rights under color of state law. Id.; see also, Youngberg, 457 U.S. at 330, 102 S.Ct. at 2465 (Burger, J., concurring). Thus,  '[i]llegality under the state statute can neither add to nor subtract from [the] constitutional validity [of a state's actions].'  Archie v. City of Racine, 847 F.2d 1211, 1216 (7th Cir.1988) (quoting Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U.S. 1, 11, 64 S.Ct. 397, 402, 88 L.Ed. 497 (1944)). 12 62 We readily acknowledge the apparent indefensible passivity of at least some school defendants under the circumstances. Accepting the allegations as true, viz., that one school defendant was advised of the misconduct and apparently did not investigate, they show nonfeasance but they do not rise to the level of a constitutional violation. As in DeShaney, [t]he most that can be said of the state functionaries in this case is that they stood by and did nothing when suspicious circumstances dictated a more active role for them. DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 203, 109 S.Ct. at 1007; see also, Brown, 922 F.2d at 1116 (Defendant could and should have instructed [plaintiff] as to her rights under the [Prevention of Domestic Violence] Act. He was not, however, constitutionally compelled to do so.) 63 In sum, plaintiffs' allegations are insufficient to show, as required under DeShaney, that the school defendants either impermissibly limited the freedom of the plaintiffs to act on their own behalf, or barred their access to outside support. Nor do they demonstrate that defendants violated a constitutional duty by creating or exacerbating the danger posed by the student defendants. See Brown, 922 F.2d at 1116. It is not our province to say what the state responsibility is or should be in situations like the present. We do say that the Fourteenth Amendment does not automatically embrace such conduct. 64