Court Opinion

ID: 9430260
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:29:21.965286+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:23.957702
License: Public Domain

Justice Stevens,
concurring in the judgments.*
Two prisoners raise similar claims in these two cases. Both seek to recover for personal injuries suffered, in part, from what they allege was negligence by state officials. Both characterize their injuries as “deprivations of liberty” and both invoke 42 U. S. C. § 1983 as a basis for their claims.
Prisoner Roy Daniels was injured when he slipped on a newspaper and pillows left on a stairway in the Virginia jail where he is incarcerated; he alleges state negligence in the presence of the objects on the stairs. Prisoner Robert Davidson suffered injury when he was attacked by another inmate in the New Jersey prison where he is incarcerated; he alleges (and proved at trial) state negligence in the failure of prison authorities to prevent the assault after he had written a note expressing apprehension about the inmate who ultimately assaulted him. I agree with the majority that petitioners cannot prevail under § 1983. I do not agree, however, that it is necessary either to redefine the meaning of “deprive” in the Fourteenth Amendment,1 or to repudiate *337the reasoning of Parratt v. Taylor, 451 U. S. 527 (1981), to support this conclusion.
We should begin by identifying the precise constitutional claims that petitioners have advanced. It is not enough to note that they rely on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for that Clause is the source of three different kinds of constitutional protection. First, it incorporates specific protections defined in the Bill of Rights. Thus, the State, as well as the Federal Government, must comply with the commands in the First2 and Eighth3 Amendments; so too, the State must respect the guarantees in the Fourth,4 Fifth,5 and Sixth6 Amendments. Second, it contains a substantive component, sometimes referred to as “substantive due process,” which bars certain arbitrary government actions “regardless of the fairness of the procedures used to implement them.” Ante, at 331.7 Third, it is a guarantee of fair procedure, sometimes referred to as “procedural due process”: the State may not execute, imprison, or fine a defendant without giving him a fair trial,8 nor may it take property without providing appropriate procedural safeguards.9
The type of Fourteenth Amendment interest that is implicated has important effects on the nature of the constitutional claim and the availability of § 1983 relief. If the claim is in *338the first category (a violation of one of the specific constitutional guarantees of the Bill of Rights), a plaintiff may invoke § 1983 regardless of the availability of a state remedy.10 As explained in Monroe v. Pape, 365 U. S. 167 (1961), this conclusion derives from the fact that the statute — the Ku Klux Act of 1871 — was intended to provide a federal remedy for the violation of a federal constitutional right. Thus, when the Fourth Amendment is violated, as in Pape, the provision of an independent federal remedy under § 1983 is necessary to satisfy the purpose of the statute.
Similarly, if the claim is in the second category (a violation of the substantive component of the Due Process Clause), a plaintiff may also invoke § 1983 regardless of the availability of a state remedy.11 For, in that category, no less than with the provisions of the Bill of Rights, if the Federal Constitution prohibits a State from taking certain actions “regardless of the fairness of the procedures used to implement them,” the constitutional violation is complete as soon as the prohibited action is taken; the independent federal remedy is then authorized by the language and legislative history of § 1983.
A claim in the third category — a procedural due process claim — is fundamentally different. In such a case, the deprivation may be entirely legitimate — a State may have every right to discharge a teacher or punish a student — but the State may nevertheless violate the Constitution by failing to provide appropriate procedural safeguards. The constitutional duty to provide fair procedures gives the citizen the opportunity to try to prevent the deprivation from happening, but the deprivation itself does not necessarily reflect any *339“abuse” of state power. Similarly, a deprivation may be the consequence of a mistake or a negligent act, and the State may violate the Constitution by failing to provide an appropriate procedural response. In a procedural due process claim, it is not the deprivation of property or liberty that is unconstitutional; it is the deprivation of property or liberty without due process of ¿aw — without adequate procedures.
Thus, even though the State may have every right to deprive a person of his property or his liberty, the individual may nevertheless be able to allege a valid § 1983 due process claim, perhaps because a predeprivation hearing must be held,12 or because the state procedure itself is fundamentally flawed.13 So too, even though a deprivation may be unauthorized, a procedural due process claim may be raised if it challenges the State’s procedures for preventing or redressing the deprivation. However, a complaint does not state a valid procedural due process objection — and a valid §1983 claim — if it does not include a challenge to the fundamental fairness of the State’s procedures. In consequence, when a predeprivation hearing is clearly not feasible,14 when the regime of state tort law provides a constitutionally unobjectionable system of recovery for the deprivation of property or liberty, and when there is no other challenge to the State’s procedures, a valid § 1983 claim is not stated. For, unlike cases in the other two categories —those in which the alleged *340deprivation violates a substantive federal right — if a procedural due process claim lacks a colorable objection to the validity of the State’s procedures, no constitutional violation has been alleged.15
Petitioners’ claims are not of the first kind. Neither Daniels nor Davidson argues in this Court that the prison authorities’ actions violated specific constitutional guarantees incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment. Neither now claims, for instance, that his rights under the Eighth Amendment were violated. Similarly, I do not believe petitioners have raised a colorable violation of “substantive due process.”16 Rather, their claims are of the third kind: Daniels and Davidson attack the validity of the procedures that Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, provide for prisoners who seek redress for physical injury caused by the negligence of corrections officers.
I would not reject these claims, as the Court does, by attempting to fashion a new definition of the term “depriva*341tion” and excluding negligence from its scope. No serious question has been raised about the presence of “state action” in the allegations of negligence,17 and the interest in freedom from bodily harm surely qualifies as an interest in “liberty.” Thus, the only question is whether negligence by state actors can result in a deprivation. “Deprivation,” it seems to me, identifies, not the actor’s state of mind, but the victim’s infringement or loss. The harm to a prisoner is the same whether a pillow is left on a stair negligently, recklessly, or intentionally; so too, the harm resulting to a prisoner from an attack is the same whether his request for protection is ignored negligently, recklessly, or deliberately. In each instance, the prisoner is losing-being “deprived” of — an aspect of liberty as the result, in part, of a form of state action.
Thus, I would characterize each loss as a “deprivation” of liberty. Because the cases raise only procedural due process claims, however, it is also necessary to examine the nature of petitioners’ challenges to the state procedures. To prevail, petitioners must demonstrate that the state procedures for redressing injuries of this kind are constitutionally inadequate. Petitioners must show that they contain a defect so serious that we can characterize the procedures as fundamentally unfair, a defect so basic that we are forced to conclude that the deprivation occurred without due process.
Daniels’ claim is essentially the same as the claim we rejected in Parratt. The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit determined that Daniels had a remedy for the claimed negligence under Virginia law. Although Daniels vigorously argues that sovereign immunity would have defeated his claim, the Fourth Circuit found to the contrary, and it is our settled practice to defer to the Courts of Appeals on ques*342tions of state law.18 It is true that Parratt involved an injury to “property” and that Daniels’ case involves an injury to “liberty,” but, in both cases, the plaintiff claimed nothing more than a “procedural due process” violation. In both cases, a predeprivation hearing was definitionally impossible.19 And, in both cases, the plaintiff had state remedies that permitted recovery if state negligence was established. Thus, a straightforward application of Parratt defeats Daniels’ claim.
Davidson’s claim raises a question not specifically addressed in Parratt. According to the Third Circuit, no state remedy was available because a New Jersey statute prohibits prisoner recovery from state employees for injuries inflicted by other prisoners. Thus, Davidson puts the question whether a state policy of noncompensability for certain types of harm, in which state action may play a role, renders a state procedure constitutionally defective. In my judgment, a state policy that defeats recovery does not, in itself, carry that consequence. Those aspects of a State’s tort regime that defeat recovery are not constitutionally invalid, so long as there is no fundamental unfairness in their operation. Thus, defenses such as contributory negligence or statutes of limitations may defeat recovery in particular cases without raising any question about the constitutionality of a State’s procedures for disposing of tort litigation. Similarly, in my judgment, the mere fact that a State elects to provide some of its agents with a sovereign immunity defense in certain cases does not justify the conclusion that its remedial system is constitutionally inadequate. There is no reason to believe that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment *343and the legislation enacted pursuant to §5 of that Amendment should be construed to suggest that the doctrine of sovereign immunity renders a state procedure fundamentally unfair.20 Davidson’s challenge has been only to the fact of sovereign immunity; he has not challenged the difference in treatment of a prisoner assaulted by a prisoner and a non-prisoner assaulted by a prisoner, and I express no comment on the fairness of that differentiation.
Thus, although I believe that the harms alleged by Daniels and proved by Davidson qualify as deprivations of liberty, I am not persuaded that either has raised a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I therefore concur in the judgments.

[This opinion applies also to Davidson v. Cannon et al., No. 84-6470, post, p. 344.]

 “[N]or shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . .” U. S. Const., Amdt. 14.

 See, e. g., Douglas v. Jeannette, 319 U. S. 157 (1943).

 See, e. g, Robinson v. California, 370 U. S. 660 (1962).

 See, 0. g., Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (1961).

 See, e. g., Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1 (1964) (right to protection from compelled self-incrimination applies to States); Benton v. Maryland, 395 U. S. 784 (1969) (right to protection from double jeopardy applies to States).

 See, e. g., Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145 (1968) (right to jury trial applies to States).

 See also Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U. S. 494 (1977); Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U. S. 307 (1982).

 See, e. g., Groppi v. Leslie, 404 U. S. 496 (1972); In re Oliver, 333 U. S. 257 (1948).

 See, e. g., Fuentes v. Shevin, 407 U. S. 67 (1972).

 See, e. g., Monroe v. Pape, 365 U. S. 167 (1961) (§1983 action for Fourth Amendment violation); Smith v. Wade, 461 U. S. 30 (1983) (§ 1983 action for Eighth Amendment violation). See generally McNeese v. Board of Education, 373 U. S. 668, 672 (1963) (§ 1983 is “supplementary to any remedy any State might have”).

 Cf. Parratt v. Taylor, 451 U. S. 527, 545 (1981) (Blackmun, J., concurring); Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973).

 See, e. g., Loudermill v. Cleveland Board of Education, 470 U. S. 532 (1985); Carey v. Piphus, 435 U. S. 247 (1978); Goss v. Lopez, 419 U. S. 565 (1975). Cf. Groppi, supra.

 Cf. Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co., 455 U. S. 422, 436 (1982) (postdeprivation state remedy is inadequate when challenge is to “the state system itself”); Baker v. McCollan, 443 U. S. 137, 156 (1979) (Stevens, J., dissenting).

 See Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U. S. 517, 533 (1984) (“[W]hen deprivations of property are effected through random and unauthorized conduct of a state employee, predeprivation procedures are simply ‘impracticable’ since the state cannot know when such deprivations will occur”); Parratt v. Taylor, supra.

 See id, at 543-544.

 Davidson explicitly disavows a substantive due process claim. See Brief for Petitioner in No. 84-6470, p. 7 (“[P]etitioner frames his claim here purely in terms of procedural due process”). At oral argument, counsel for Daniels did suggest that he was pursuing a substantive due process claim. Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 84-5872, p. 22. However, the Court of Appeals viewed Daniels’ claim as a procedural due process argument, see 748 F. 2d 229, 230, n. 1 (CA4 1984) (“There is no claim of any substantive due process violation”), and Daniels did not dispute this characterization in his petition for certiorari or in his brief on the merits.
In any event, to the extent that petitioners’ arguments about the special obligations of prison officials may be read as a substantive due process claim, I agree with the Court, ante, at 335-336, that the sheriff’s “special duty of care” recognized in South v. Maryland, 18 How. 396 (1856), does not have its source in the Federal Constitution. In these circumstances, it seems to me, the substantive constitutional duties of prison officials to prisoners are defined by the Eighth Amendment, not by substantive due process. Cf. United States ex rel. Miller v. Twomey, 479 F. 2d 701, 719-721 (CA7 1973) (analyzing prison officials’ responsibilities to prevent inmate assaults under the Eighth Amendment), cert, denied sub nom. Gutierrez v. Department of Public Safety of Illinois, 414 U. S. 1146 (1974).

 Respondents in Davidson do raise a state-action objection in one sentence, Brief for Respondents in No. 84-6470, p. 13, n., but that bare reference is inadequate to mount a challenge to the undisturbed District Court finding of state action.

 See Haring v. Prosise, 462 U. S. 306, 314, n. 8 (1983); Leroy v. Great Western United Corp., 443 U. S. 173, 181, n. 11 (1979); Bishop v. Wood, 426 U. S. 341, 345-347 (1976); Propper v. Clark, 337 U. S. 472, 486-487 (1949).

 It borders on the absurd to suggest that a State must provide a hearing to determine whether or not a corrections officer should engage in negligent conduct.

 In Martinez v. California, 444 U. S. 277 (1980), we held that California’s immunity statute did not violate the Due Process Clause simply because it operated to defeat a tort claim arising under state law. The fact that an immunity statute does not give rise to a procedural due process claim does not, of course, mean that a State’s doctrine of sovereign immunity can protect conduct that violates a federal constitutional guarantee; obviously it cannot, see Martinez, supra, at 284, n. 8, quoting Hampton v. Chicago, 484 F. 2d 602, 607 (CA7 1973), cert. denied, 415 U. S. 917 (1974).