Court Opinion

ID: 9633433
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 11:47:42.192323+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:26:54.933438
License: Public Domain

COOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the majority’s opinion in its entirety. I write separately to elaborate on the majority’s observation about the “virtual uniqueness” of the combination of a privacy-right violation with a state-created-danger claim, as presented both in this case and in Kallstrom v. City of Columbus, 136 F.3d 1055 (6th Cir.1998). See ante at 461. Kallstrom blends two conceptually distinct forms of § 1983 analysis in a dupli-cative and confusion-creating mix that leads this panel down an errant path. For cases with like circumstances, it is worth rethinking Kallstrom.
The state-created-danger doctrine holds the State responsible to protect citizens against private-actor invasions of life, liberty, and property when the State, through its affirmative acts and with the requisite level of culpability, establishes a special danger increasing the likelihood that a private actor would violate a person’s life, liberty, or property rights. See, e.g., Jones v. Reynolds, 438 F.3d 685, 690 (6th Cir.2006). The doctrine integrates with § 1983’s two requirements as follows: An individual is deprived of a substantive due process right — life, liberty, or property — by a private actor, which satisfies § 1983’s deprivation requirement. That actor was enabled by the State to a degree that the plaintiff can rightly hold the State liable for its failure to protect him from the private deprivation. Section 1983’s state action requirement is satisfied by the state-created-danger doctrine’s three-element test, which ensures that the state acted (1) affirmatively, (2) with respect to the plaintiff in particular, and (3) “with the requisite culpability to establish a substantive due process violation under the Fourteenth Amendment.” 1 McQueen v. Beech*459er Cmty. Schs., 433 F.3d 460, 464-69 (6th Cir.2006) (quoting Ewolski v. City of Brunswick, 287 F.3d 492, 510 (6th Cir.2002)); see also, e.g., Jones, 438 F.3d at 690.
In every § 1983 case employing the state-created-danger method to tie state action to private violence — other than Kallstrom and this one — a private actor actually violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights and the government itself did not. In each of these cases, identifying the deprivation was a straightforward exercise: the killed, beaten, raped, or otherwise injured victims suffered a physical invasion that clearly implicated their substantive due process rights. See Koulta v. Merciez, 477 F.3d 442 (6th Cir.2007) (victim killed by drunk driver); Jones, 438 F.3d 685 (victim died after being struck by a car drag-racing on a public street); May v. Franklin County Comm’rs, 437 F.3d 579 (6th Cir.2006) (victim murdered by her boyfriend); McQueen, 433 F.3d 460 (student shot and killed by another student); Jackson v. Schultz, 429 F.3d 586 (6th Cir.2005) (victim died in an ambulance after sustaining gunshot wounds in barroom brawl); Schroder v. City of Fort Thomas, 412 F.3d 724 (6th Cir.2005) (child killed by speeding motorist); Cartwright v. City of Marine City, 336 F.3d 487 (6th Cir.2003) (victim hit by a truck and killed after police transported him to a convenience store parking lot from the shoulder of a highway); Bukowski v. City of Akron, 326 F.3d 702 (6th Cir.2003) (mentally disabled woman raped after police returned her to home of assailant after she requested to be returned); Jones v. Union County, 296 F.3d 417 (6th Cir.2002) (victim shot, but not killed, by abusive ex-husband); Sheets v. Mullins, 287 F.3d 581 (6th Cir.2002) (infant victim killed by his father); Ewolski, 287 F.3d 492 (victim shot fatally himself and his son during a police standoff); Weeks v. Portage County Executive Offices, 235 F.3d 275 (6th Cir.2000) (victim beaten by private actor, denied help by the police, and then died); Summar v. Bennett, 157 F.3d 1054 (6th Cir.1998) (police informant murdered after inclusion of his name on an indictment); Sargi v. Kent City Bd. of Educ., 70 F.3d 907 (6th Cir.1995) (child suffered fatal heart failure on a school bus); Gazette v. City of Pontiac, 41 F.3d 1061 (6th Cir.1994) (victim died after being abducted by a car wash employee); Caldwell v. City of Louisville, 120 Fed.Appx. 566 (6th Cir.2004) (victim murdered by abusive boyfriend); Waller v. Trippett, 49 Fed.Appx. 45 (6th Cir.2004) (prison employee murdered by prisoner). As the majority notes, the same feature prevails in other circuits. See ante at 455-56.
In the typical state-created-danger case, then, the plaintiff complains about a harmful act by a private actor, facilitated by the government to such a degree that the harm can be said to result from state action. Kallstrom, on the other hand, invoked the state-created-danger formulation in the absence of any harm from a private actor — an entirely unique circumstance. Examining the two branches of the Kallstrom analysis (really two claims blended into a peculiar hybrid) brings the matter into focus. Kallstrom first acknowledged and explained its recognition of the Columbus officers’ direct claim against the City, premised on the privacy deprivation suffered by the officers when *460the City released the records. 136 F.3d at 1060-65. The success of that claim hinged on whether the privacy right breached was of constitutional dimension, and whether the government acted with the requisite level of culpability. At that juncture, one might have expected the panel to wrap up. But the opinion went on to discuss what could only be another claim against the City — one also premised on the City’s release of the same private information — a claim seeming to lack a deprivation caused by private violence. That is, the panel discussed the role the City’s release played in increasing the risk of violence/harm to the officers. Id. at 1066-67. Evaluating the City’s § 1983 liability by way of a state-created-danger theory seems peculiar for two reasons: (1) the direct claim assessed the danger/risk aspect of the record’s release in concluding that the City breached the officers’ constitutional rights, and (2) there being no additional deprivation of constitutional privacy rights by any private actor (courts have never recognized a constitutional right to be free from harassment or threats of violence), no basis existed to engage in a state-created-danger analysis. Increased exposure to risk, as discussed in the context of state-created danger, concerns the backward look courts take to find state action after an injury. My search for another case where exposure to “increased risk” sufficed to hold a state actor responsible produced none. Supra at 458. The point is, no constitutionally cognizable injury exists in the absence of physical harm to tie to the State’s action.
Kallstrom employed the state-created-danger doctrine for a purpose other than linking private actor deprivations and government facilitation; instead, it used the doctrine to assess whether the plaintiffs could “prove up” their damages. Because the Kallstrom plaintiffs already demonstrated that the City violated their constitutional rights with the requisite state of mind, what was left but the issue of damages- — the harm suffered from the increased risk of violence at the hands of the Short North Posse. This may be a sound means of testing the connection between a plaintiffs privacy claim and the damages claimed to flow from it, but Kallstrom’s application of the doctrine departs significantly from its intended use.
If Lowery directly violated the plaintiffs’ constitutionally recognized privacy rights, then we need not concern ourselves with the way in which Lowery’s actions enabled private actors for state action purposes. If the plaintiffs can point to the defendant’s violation of a constitutionally recognized privacy right protecting them from State disclosure of their private information, then they would have a direct cause of action under § 1983 against Lowery. These plaintiffs’ constitutional rights were violated, if at all, by Lowery, who, as he admits, was acting under color of state law in performing his duties. One could ask, as the D.C. Circuit does, see Butera, 235 F.3d at 651, given the State’s duty to protect the prison guards, how did it breach that duty? The breach is not the affirmative act of releasing the documents, because the affirmative act merely created the dangerous situation which gave rise to the duty to protect — the breach cannot precede the very existence of the duty. The plaintiffs have yet to suffer any private violence at all, so, arguably, the state did not fail in its duty to protect them from the private violence its actions could have enabled.
Properly framed, I would examine the plaintiffs’ claim under the direct-injury rubric of County of Sacramento v. Lewis, which would require them to show that the defendants’ conduct in releasing their information violated their constitutional right to privacy and that the defendants *461did so in a manner that “shocks the conscience.” 523 U.S. 833, 846-49, 118 S.Ct. 1708, 140 L.Ed.2d 1043 (1998). Because I agree with the majority that these plaintiffs did not suffer a constitutional privacy deprivation, and because Lowery’s failure to redact, though unfortunate, does not shock the conscience, I would affirm the district court on these grounds.

. The D.C. Circuit in Butera v. District of Columbia, 235 F.3d 637 (D.C.Cir.2001), offered a slightly different way of thinking about this framework. Butera identified the right deprived as follows:
We join the other circuits in holding that, under the State endangerment concept, an individual can assert a substantive due process right to protection by the District of Columbia from third-party violence when District of Columbia officials affirmatively act to increase or create the danger that ultimately results in the individual's harm.
Id. at 651 (emphasis added). This formulation articulates a right that attaches directly to the government: the State violates a person's constitutional rights when it fails to protect him from third-parly harms that it *459helped create. Under this formulation, the deprivation is somewhat indirect, and occurs in the State’s failure to protect a person after it has placed him in danger; the State could satisfy its duty if it prevents any harm from occurring after it commits the affirmative acts that created the harm. But the deprivation is committed by the State, rather than a third party, which better conforms to conventional § 1983 thinking.