Court Opinion

ID: 9480470
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:48:58.716918+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:42.687138
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a state from depriving any person of liberty *228without due process of law. In a number of decisions, including Wilson v. Beebe, 770 F.2d 578 (6th Cir.1985) (en banc), this court, like others, has recognized a distinction not apparent in the language of the Constitution: a distinction between “procedural” due process of law, which sounds redundant, and “substantive” due process of law, which sounds like a contradiction in terms.
I must take it as given that the Due Process Clause does in fact have what the Supreme Court calls a “substantive component,” see DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189, 109 S.Ct. 998, 103 L.Ed.2d 249 (1989), and that circumstances can exist in which a person might be found to have been deprived of liberty without “substantive due process of law.” But I am reluctant to try to come to grips with that “ephemeral concept,” as we called it in Gutzwiller v. Fenik, 860 F.2d 1317, 1328 (6th Cir.1988), absent a clear necessity for doing so. I see no such necessity here. I have no quarrel with the answer the court gives to the question of whether the defendant’s conduct “shocks the conscience,” however, and in all other respects I fully concur in the court's opinion.
District Judge BATTISTI joins in this concurrence.