Court Opinion

ID: 9474161
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:49:30.492304+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:56.054596
License: Public Domain

GOLDBERG, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
With his usual accuracy and clarity, Judge Higginbotham has set out the facts that are beyond dispute. Because I detect a corresponding absence of those qualities in the majority’s exposition of the law, and because the failure to hold San Jacinto County liable for the acts of its elected official Rathell Denson runs counter to Monell, Bennett, Familias, and Crane, I dissent.
Bennett v. City of Slidell tells us that there are essentially two ways in which a plaintiff can hold the county liable for the acts of its officials and employees. The first, which is not at issue in this case, is where a
persistent, widespread practice of city officials or employees, which, although not authorized by officially adopted and promulgated policy, is so common and *111well settled as to constitute a custom that fairly represents municipal policy.
735 F.2d 861, 862 (5th Cir.1984) (en banc) (denying reh’g with opinion), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 105 S.Ct. 3476, 87 L.Ed.2d 612 (1985).
While this test presents difficult line-drawing problems as to what is “so common and well-settled as to constitute a custom,” the second test, which is at issue here, presents far fewer line-drawing problems. In deciding whether the unconstitutional acts of Rathell Denson, an elected constable of Precinct 4 of San Jacinto County, reflect county policy, we need only determine whether his acts represent a
decision that [was] officially adopted and promulgated by the [county’s] lawmaking officers or by an official to whom the lawmakers have delegated policy-making authority.

Id.

The court in Bennett was principally preoccupied with the question of how the acts of unelected officials are to be attributed to a governing body. The court addressed the problem of elected officials by explicitly affirming “the writing in Familias Unidas v. Briscoe, 619 F.2d 391 (5th Cir.1980), as it relates to the officer who obtains policy-making authority by virtue of the office to which that officer is elected.” Id. It is to Familias that I now turn.
The majority quotes the relevant language in Familias, but then proceeds to ignore it. I quote it again:
Because of the unique structure of county government in Texas, the judge — like other elected county officials, such as the sheriff and treasurer — holds virtually absolute sway over the particular tasks or areas of responsibility entrusted to him by state status and is accountable to no one other than the voters for his conduct therein. Thus, at least in those areas in which he, alone, is the final authority or ultimate repository of county power, his official conduct and decisions must necessarily be considered those of one “whose edicts or acts may fairly be said to represent official policy” for which the county may be held responsible under section 1983.
619 F.2d 391, 404 (5th Cir.1980) (citations omitted), quoting Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. at 694, 98 S.Ct. at 2038.
In Crane v. State of Texas, 759 F.2d 412 (5th Cir.1985), Judge Gee, writing for a unanimous panel, held that this language clearly covered the acts of a City District Attorney, whose
authority to establish County procedures for issuing misdemeanor capias [which procedures were challenged as unconstitutional] derived from the County office to which he was elected by County voters. * * * Because the ultimate authority for determining County capias procedures reposed in the District Attorney, an elected county official, his decisions in that regard must be considered official policy attributable to the County. As we stated in Bowen v. Watkins, 669 F.2d 979 (5th Cir.1982),
At some level of authority, there must be an official whose acts reflect governmental policy, for the government necessarily acts through its agents. Thus the question becomes one of identifying the official who has authority to make policy; then municipal liability attaches to acts performed pursuant to that policy. When an official has final authority in a matter involving the selection of goals or of means of achieving goals, his choices represent governmental policy.
669 F.2d at 989. The County in this case acted through the District Attorney; he selected the means by which the County was to achieve a sound and legally sufficient capias system. His choice of an unsound and legally insufficient system represents County policy for which the County is liable.
While a constable does not occupy a position as lofty as that of a county judge or district attorney,1 he nonetheless, by virtue *112of his elected position, “holds virtually absolute sway over the tasks or areas of responsibility entrusted to him by state statute and is accountable to no one other than the voters for his conduct therein.” Familias. The majority acknowledges as much:
[Although the commissioners’ court disburses his salary, the commissioners’ court and the county judge have no supervisory authority or other direct superintendence over the constable’s training, qualifications, or the manner in which he performs his constable duties, [supra at 109] * * * [W]hile Denson was constable for county precinct number four, not the entire County, he could serve process and make arrests and otherwise carry out the duties of a peace officer throughout the County. [0]nly judges of a state district court, with districts that may include several counties, may remove him [or a county judge] from office. TEX. CONST, art. 5 § 24. [supra at 109].
Perhaps because they recognize the force of what they are conceding, the majority writes that the “critical circumstance is that Denson, as a constable of a precinct, was not given that discretion, or range of choice, that is at the core of the power to impose one’s own chosen policy.” Supra at 109. The majority’s test fails to support them here. As the Supreme Court remarked in another context about the powers of unelected peace officers, “[p]olice officers in the ranks do not formulate policy, per se, but they are clothed with authority to exercise an almost infinite variety of discretionary powers.” Foley v. Connelie, 435 U.S. 291, 98 S.Ct. 1067, 1071, 55 L.Ed.2d 287 (1978) (discretionary powers listed) (alien rights case). A fortiori, an elected constable, whose term of office, along with those of county commissioners and justices of the peace, was increased in 1954 from two to four years “in the interest of obtaining increased efficiency in the administration of county government,” TEX.CONST. art. 5 § 18 (quoting interpretive commentary), exercises the same “almost infinite variety of discretionary powers.”
Unlike an unelected, appointed police chief who can pass the buck to the mayor or aldermen, see Brewer v. Blackwell, 692 F.2d 387, 401 (5th Cir.1982), the county-constable is the top dog in the areas of responsibility granted to him by virtue of his office. The bucks stop with him. When Rathell Denson decided that, in the exercise of his unsupervised and otherwise lawful power to arrest Rhode, he needed to shoot at Rhode’s car and then place him in a cell without medical attention (where Rhode was forced to wash his wounds with water from a toilet), he exercised his “final authority in a matter involving the ... means of achieving goals.” As such, “his choices represent governmental policy.” Crane v. State of Texas, 759 F.2d at 430, quoting Bowen v. Watkins, 669 F.2d at 989.
Once it is determined that an elected official has acted by virtue of his office in the area over which he holds virtually absolute sway, it is irrelevant that his act was an isolated one. The act was the county’s, and for the purposes of determining how to arrest someone who passes on the shoulder, Denson’s decision to give chase, fire shots, and withhold medical attention was the county’s decision. Id. When an elected official makes that decision, we do not require that he file away an embossed document stating that when someone passes him on the shoulder, he will give chase, fire shots, and withhold medical attention. As long as Denson was acting in his official capacity — and no one contends that he was not — his acts represent a “decision that *113was officially adopted and promulgated.” Bennett, 735 F.2d at 862.2
The majority’s last line of defense is that “because the [constable’s] actions were confined to implementing a state statute, in contrast to his ‘traditional role in the administration of county government or to the discretionary powers delegated to him by state statute in aid of that role,’ the [constable] was effectuating state not county policy.” This argument fails for two reasons. First, Denson was indeed exercising his traditional role and those discretionary powers delegated to him by state statute in aid of that role.
Second, and more important, the majority indulges in the same misreading of Familias by the district court in Crane that the panel in Crane unanimously rejected. 759 F.2d at 430 n. 19. As the Crane panel pointed out, the county judge’s implementation of state law in Familias was not attributed to the county for two reasons, neither of which has any relevance here. First, the constitutional violation in Familias was found in the state law itself, “for which the citizens of a particular county should not bear singular responsibility.” Familias at 404. As in Crane, Denson here “failed to comply with a constitutional state statutory scheme; the error was in [his] interpretation, not in the scheme.” Crane, at n. 19. Second, “the statute at issue in Familias Unidas was narrowly drawn, leaving little, if any, room for the exercise of discretion in its implementation.” Id. By contrast, as I have argued above, Denson was required to exercise discretion in the manner in which he placed Rhode under arrest.
At the risk of boring the reader but confident of my good intentions, I return to Crane one last time:
Familias Unidas cannot thus properly be construed to immunize local governments from § 1983 damage liability for actions within the discretion of their officials which prove to be both unconstitutional and illegal under state law. It stands rather for the unexceptionable proposition that local governments and their officials who act in conformance with a state statutory scheme will not be held liable for § 1983 damages if the scheme is later held unconstitutional. Familias Unidas therefore provides no support for the [majority’s] finding in this case.
Id. Denson’s unconstitutional acts were by no stretch of the imagination “in conformance with a state statutory scheme.”
By virtue of his elective office, Rathell Denson was required to go about his duties as constable in a manner that comported with the federal constitution. Having elected someone who pursued his duties in an unconstitutional manner, the citizens of San Jacinto County are required by 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to bear the burden of their mistake. Because the majority concludes otherwise, I dissent.

. The majority’s reductio ad absurdum argument — "Direct election of school janitors or toll *112takers or surveyors answerable only on recall would not make them policymakers" — misses the mark. If the county by some political fluke chooses to elect school janitors, and those janitors are accountable to no one other than the voters, and a janitor somehow commits an unconstitutional act in his or her official capacity as a janitor, Familias and Crane require that the county be held liable. Since these positions are not filled through the ballot box, we need not yet worry ourselves about them.

. The majority’s statement that a "discrete tort [does not] express policy in the sense that it sets a course or connects discrete dots to form a discernible line” confuses the question of whether a person is a policymaker, with the question of whether an act represents a “custom.” The answer to the latter question provides a wholly distinct means of attributing liability to the county under Monell and Bennett and is not at issue here.