Court Opinion

ID: 9490500
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:45:19.928433+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:08.268824
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
with whom Circuit Judge FLETCHER joins, concurring.
Smith’s complaint is a triumph of petulance over common sense. A teenager who gets into trouble because she is caught bringing knives to school might, for lack of mature judgment, feel that she is the one who has been wronged. But she can’t turn such wishful thinking into a lawsuit without support from her parents and the services of a lawyer-adults who do not have youth and inexperience as excuses. Before bringing suit, Smith’s parents might profitably have pondered their own culpability and considered what they might have done to prevent their child’s misconduct. Smith’s lawyer might have thought about whether it was right to impose the cost, risk and pain of a lawsuit on a civil servant who acted responsibly under difficult circumstances. And Smith herself might have thanked her lucky stars when she got off easy because her juvenile court judge misread the law and suppressed the evidence. Smith and the adults who abetted her might all have taken a lesson in common *789sense from the other students who were subjected to the same search — and thus suffered the same “harm” — but did not make a federal case out of it.
There are, unfortunately, too many instances of genuine official abuse. See, e.g., Lohr v. State of Florida Dept, of Corrections, 835 F.2d 1404 (11th Cir.1988) (sheriff handcuffed inmate and ordered dog to attack him); Davis v. Locke, 936 F.2d 1208 (11th Cir.1991) (guards taunted prisoner with racial slurs and dropped him from truck onto his head while shackled); Cox v. District of Columbia, 821 F.Supp. 1 (D.D.C.1993) (police officer beat and kicked Cox, ground foot into his face, then threw him into paddywagon and drove around so as to slam Cox against walls). Our ability to deal with such cases is diminished when the civil rights laws are trivialized as they were here. It reflects ill on the legal profession and our litigious society that this vexatious lawsuit was filed at all, and that it’s been pursued this far.