Court Opinion

ID: 9409390
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-07-18 00:00:28.889888+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:20:50.171685
License: Public Domain

Case: 22-20423        Document: 00516823272             Page: 1      Date Filed: 07/17/2023

             United States Court of Appeals
                  for the Fifth Circuit
                                                                                     United States Court of Appeals
                                                                                              Fifth Circuit

                                     ____________                                           FILED
                                                                                        July 17, 2023
                                      No. 22-20423                                     Lyle W. Cayce
                                     ____________                                           Clerk

   Oyinlola Zinsou, Individually and as a representative of the Estate
   of Olufemi Odutayo; Funmilola Olukemi Odutayo;
   Kolawole Odutayo; Olatunde Odutayo,

                                                                  Plaintiffs—Appellants,

                                            versus

   Fort Bend County; Will Chen; Jose Diaz; James Smalley,

                                              Defendants—Appellees.
                     ______________________________

                     Appeal from the United States District Court
                         for the Southern District of Texas
                               USDC No. 4:21-CV-2151
                     ______________________________

   Before Graves, Higginson, and Douglas, Circuit Judges.
   James E. Graves, Jr., Circuit Judge:*
         Oyinlola Zinsou, individually and as a representative of the Estate of
   Olufemi Odutayo, Funmilola Olukemi Odutayo, Kolawole Odutayo, and
   Olatunde Odutayo (collectively, “Plaintiffs”) appeal the district court’s
   dismissal of their complaint against Fort Bend County, Jose Diaz, James
   Smalley, and Will Chen (collectively, “Defendants”) for alleged violations
         _____________________
         *
             This opinion is not designated for publication. See 5th Cir. R. 47.5.
Case: 22-20423      Document: 00516823272          Page: 2   Date Filed: 07/17/2023

                                    No. 22-20423

   of their mother’s constitutional rights. The district court dismissed
   Plaintiffs’ claims because they failed to sufficiently allege that their mother
   was in a “special relationship” with the state. We AFFIRM.
                                I. Background
                              a. Factual Background
          Plaintiffs allege the following facts in their first amended complaint.
   On July 5, 2019, Olufemi Odutayo was having health problems in her home.
   At 3:36 a.m., one of her children called 911. Fort Bend County Emergency
   Medical Services dispatched a crew in response to the call including
   individual Defendants Chen, Diaz, and Smalley. When they arrived at Ms.
   Odutayo’s home at 3:52 a.m., they did not immediately initiate care. One
   crew member asked Funmilola Odutayo, one of Ms. Odutayo’s daughters,
   questions about her mother’s background because Ms. Odutayo could not
   speak English. Funmilola begged the crew to let her ride in the ambulance to
   the hospital so she could provide more information about her mother’s
   medication and health, but they refused. When the EMS crew was ready to
   load Ms. Odutayo into the ambulance, they made her get up and walk to the
   stretcher. Ms. Odutayo vomited twice, and the crew knew she was having
   trouble breathing. The EMS crew then took Ms. Odutayo off her home
   oxygen without knowing her flow rate and placed her on their own oxygen.
   Funmilola saw her mother gasping for air and told the crew the flow rate her
   mother needed, but the EMS crew did nothing. The crew started performing
   chest compressions on Ms. Odutayo once she was in the ambulance, but they
   did not leave to go the hospital for several more minutes. The ambulance left
   the scene at 4:25 a.m. and arrived at the hospital at 4:34 a.m. Ms. Odutayo
   was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital.

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                                     No. 22-20423

                             b. Procedural Background
          Plaintiffs sued Fort Bend County, Chen, Diaz, and Smalley for
   violating their mother’s Fourteenth Amendment right to adequate medical
   care by acting with deliberate indifference to her health needs. They also
   alleged that Fort Bend County had a custom or policy of depriving emergency
   patients of reasonable medical care. Defendants Fort Bend County, Smalley,
   and Diaz filed a motion to dismiss Plaintiffs’ first amended complaint for
   failure to state a claim. Defendant Chen later filed a similar motion.
          The district court granted the Defendants’ motions. It found that
   Plaintiffs failed to state a claim because they did not sufficiently allege that
   their mother had a “special relationship” with the state giving rise to a
   constitutional duty to provide for her safety. Plaintiffs timely appealed.
                           II. Standard of Review
          We review a district court’s grant of a motion to dismiss for failure to
   state a claim de novo. Whitley v. Hanna, 726 F.3d 631, 637 (5th Cir. 2013).
   We accept all well-pleaded facts as true and view those facts in the light most
   favorable to the plaintiff. Id.
                                 III. Discussion
                    a. Duty to Provide Adequate Medical Care
          The central issue in this case is whether Defendants had an affirmative
   constitutional duty to provide adequate medical care to Ms. Odutayo. The
   Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “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.” DeShaney v. Winnebago Cnty. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 489
   U.S. 189, 195 (1989). In DeShaney, a young boy and his mother filed a § 1983

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                                      No. 22-20423

   action against local child protection officials alleging that they failed to
   protect the boy from severe beatings by his father. Id. at 192-93. Addressing
   the viability of his substantive due process claim, the Supreme Court
   recognized two possible exceptions to the general rule that a State has no
   affirmative duty to provide governmental aid under the Fourteenth
   Amendment.
          First, “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.” Id. at
   199-200. “[I]t 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.” Id. at 200; see also Walton v. Alexander, 44 F.3d
   1297, 1299 (5th Cir. 1995) (en banc) (“[A] ‘special relationship’ only arises
   when a person is involuntarily confined or otherwise restrained against his
   will pursuant to a governmental order or by the affirmative exercise of state
   power.”). Following this exception, we have found that special relationships
   exist between the State and prisoners, involuntarily committed mental
   patients, people suspected of crimes injured during arrests, and children who
   are removed from their homes and placed under state supervision. M. D. by
   Stukenberg v. Abbott, 907 F.3d 237, 249 (5th Cir. 2018).
          Second, the Supreme Court alluded to a state’s duty to protect arising
   when the state creates a danger or makes an individual more vulnerable to
   that danger. DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 201 (“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.”). This exception is now known as the “state-created danger”

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                                     No. 22-20423

   doctrine. While ten other circuits have adopted it, we have yet to do so. Fisher
   v. Moore, --- F.4th ----, 2023 WL 4539588, at *7 (5th Cir. July 14, 2023)
   (Higginson, J., and Douglas, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc);
   Irish v. Fowler, 979 F.3d 65, 73-75 (1st Cir. 2020) (distilling the uniform
   requirements of the doctrine across nine other circuits and adopting the
   doctrine).
                              b. Special Relationship
          Relying on the first exception, Plaintiffs argue they sufficiently alleged
   their mother had a special relationship with the state because the Defendants
   involuntarily restrained her.
          Our sister circuits have rejected similar claims that people placed in
   ambulances were in custody for purposes of DeShaney. In Jackson v. Schultz,
   the Sixth Circuit considered whether an unconscious gunshot victim was
   involuntarily retrained when EMTs moved him from a crime scene into an
   ambulance where he later died. 429 F.3d 586, 588 (6th Cir. 2005). It first
   explained that “[i]t is not a constitutional violation for a state actor to render
   incompetent medical assistance or fail to rescue those in need.” Id. at 590.
   Turning to the allegations at hand, it found they did not show he was in
   custody:
          The EMTs did not cause decedent to be shot nor did they
          render him unconscious. There is no allegation that the EMTs
          restrained or handcuffed the decedent. There is no allegation
          that the decedent was not free to leave the ambulance or be
          removed from the ambulance. Decedent’s liberty was
          ‘constrained’ by his incapacity, and his incapacity was in no
          way caused by the defendants. In sum, no set of facts consistent
          with the allegations shows that the EMTs did anything to
          restrain the decedent’s liberty.

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                                     No. 22-20423

   Id. at 591. Consequently, the court found no constitutional violation under
   the custody exception based on the facts alleged. Id.
          In Wideman v. Shallowford Cmty. Hosp., Inc., the plaintiff was pregnant
   and called 911 when she began experiencing abdominal pain. 826 F.2d 1030,
   1031 (11th Cir. 1987). She requested that EMS personnel drive her to her
   doctor at Piedmont Hospital, but they instead took her against her wishes to
   a different hospital. Id. She was finally transferred to Piedmont after a lengthy
   delay, but her doctor could not stop her labor. Id. She gave birth to a
   premature baby, and the baby survived for only four hours. Id. She then sued
   the county and its employees claiming they violated her constitutional right
   to adequate medical treatment. Id. Acknowledging that there is no general
   constitutional right to medical care from the state, the Eleventh Circuit
   concluded that the county “did not exercise a degree of coercion, dominion,
   or restraint over” her to form a special relationship:
          The County did not force or otherwise coerce her into its
          ambulance; it merely made the ambulance available to her, and
          she entered it voluntarily. [Plaintiff]’s physical condition at the
          time might have required her to seek immediate medical help,
          and that need might have induced her to make use of the
          service provided by the County, hoping that she could
          convince the EMS employees to take her where she wanted to
          go. Her physical condition, however, cannot be attributed to
          the County.
   Id. at 1036. Accordingly, while her state tort law claims against the county
   and its employees may have been meritorious, she failed to sufficiently allege
   a constitutional violation. Id. at 1037.
          Here, like the plaintiffs in Jackson and Wideman, the state did not
   cause Ms. Odutayo’s underlying health conditions. There is no allegation
   that Defendants restrained Ms. Odutayo in any way such as by using
   handcuffs. Plaintiffs also did not allege that the Defendants forced Ms.

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                                     No. 22-20423

   Odutayo to get on the stretcher or in the ambulance against her will. To the
   contrary, their complaint alleges that the EMS crew told her to get up and
   walk to the stretcher and she did so. While their brief claims otherwise,
   Plaintiffs did not allege that they lacked the option of calling a different
   ambulance service. In sum, Plaintiffs have not alleged facts sufficient to show
   that their mother was in custody for purposes of DeShaney. Thus, the district
   court correctly dismissed Plaintiffs’ claims for failure to state a constitutional
   violation against Defendants. The district court also correctly dismissed
   Plaintiffs’ claim against the County because every Monell claim “fail[s]
   without an underlying constitutional violation.” Whitley, 726 F.3d at 648.
                                IV. Conclusion
          There is no freestanding Fourteenth Amendment right to adequate
   medical care for private citizens. As the Supreme Court explained, it is the
   state’s affirmative act of taking a person into custody and holding them
   against their will that implicates a due process interest. DeShaney, 489 U.S.
   at 200. The mere fact that Ms. Odutayo was placed in an ambulance did not
   amount to custody, so Plaintiffs cannot proceed with their constitutional
   claims.
          We AFFIRM the district court’s judgment.

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