DeShaney v. Winnebago County

(Redirected from DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services )

DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States on February 22, 1989. The court held that a state government agency's failure to prevent child abuse by a custodial parent does not violate the child's right to liberty for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution .

The Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not impose an affirmative duty on local or state governments to protect individuals from harm caused by private parties unless the individual has a "special relationship" to the State, which usually involves the State apprehending the person against their will or otherwise being the source of harm.

The case is particularly famous for Justice Harry Blackmun 's "Poor Joshua! " lamentation.

Contrary to popular misconception, DeShaney does not involve the police. Rather, it is about Child Protective Services (called the Department of Social Services in the case) failing to protect an abused child from a violent parent despite knowing the potential danger. Sixteen years later, in _Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales _ (2005), the Court reaffirmed, holding that a mother could not sue a local government under §1983 for police failure to investigate or enforce a restraining order even when three children who were reported missing were subsequently killed by their father.

Contents

• 1 Background

• 2 Case history

• 3 Ruling

  • 3.1 Court opinion

  • 3.2 Dissents

    • 3.2.1 Poor Joshua lament

• 4 Subsequent attention to ruling

• 5 See also

• 6 References

• 7 External links

Background

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County&action=edit&section=1 "Edit section: Background")

In 1980, a divorce court in Wyoming gave custody of Joshua DeShaney, born in 1979, to his father, Randy DeShaney, who moved to Neenah , Winnebago County , Wisconsin. A police report of child abuse and a hospital visit in January 1983 prompted the county Department of Social Services (DSS) to obtain a court order to keep the boy in the hospital's custody. Three days later, "On the recommendation of a 'child protection team,' consisting of a pediatrician, a psychologist, a police detective, the county's lawyer, several DSS caseworkers, and various hospital personnel, the juvenile court dismissed the case and returned the boy to the custody of his father." The DSS entered an agreement with the boy's father, and five times throughout 1983, a DSS social worker visited the DeShaney home and recorded suspicion of child abuse and that the father was not complying with the agreement's terms. No action was taken; the DSS also took no action to remove the boy from his father's custody after a hospital reported child abuse suspicions to it in November 1983. Visits in January and March 1984, at which the worker was told Joshua was too ill to see her, also resulted in no action. After the March 1984 visit, "Randy DeShaney beat 4-year-old Joshua so severely that he fell into a life-threatening coma. Emergency brain surgery revealed a series of hemorrhages caused by traumatic injuries to the head inflicted over a long period of time. Joshua suffered brain damage so severe that he was expected to spend the rest of his life confined to an institution for the profoundly mentally disabled." Joshua died on November 9, 2015, at age 36. Randy DeShaney was subsequently tried and convicted of child abuse. He served less than two years in jail.

Case history

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County&action=edit&section=2 "Edit section: Case history")

Joshua DeShaney's mother filed a lawsuit on his behalf against Winnebago County, the Winnebago County DSS, and DSS employees under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 . The suit claimed that by failing to intervene and protect him from violence about which it knew or should have known, the agency violated Joshua's right to liberty without the due process guaranteed to him by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Ruling

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County&action=edit&section=3 "Edit section: Ruling")

The court ruled 6–3 to uphold the appeals court's grant of summary judgment. The DSS's actions were found not to constitute a violation of Joshua DeShaney's due process rights.

Court opinion

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County&action=edit&section=4 "Edit section: Court opinion")

The court opinion, by Chief Justice William Rehnquist , held that the Due Process Clause protects against state action only, and as it was Randy DeShaney who abused Joshua, a state actor (the Winnebago County Department of Social Services) was not responsible.

Furthermore, it held that the DSS could not be found liable, as a matter of constitutional law, for failure to protect Joshua DeShaney from a private actor. Although there are conditions under which the state (or a subsidiary agency, like a county department of social services) is obligated to provide protection against private actors, and failure to do so is a violation of Fourteenth Amendment rights, the court reasoned:

The affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State's knowledge of the individual's predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf ... it is the State's affirmative act of restraining the individual's freedom to act on his own behalf—through incarceration, institutionalization, or other similar restraint of personal liberty—which is the "deprivation of liberty" triggering the protections of the Due Process Clause, not its failure to act to protect his liberty interests against harms inflicted by other means.

Since Joshua DeShaney was not in the DSS's custody, the DSS was not required to protect him from harm. In reaching this conclusion, the court opinion relied heavily on its precedents in _Estelle v. Gamble _ and _Youngberg v. Romeo _.

Rehnquist's opinion stated that although the DSS's failure to act may have made it liable for a tort under Wisconsin law, the Fourteenth Amendment does not make every tort by a state actor a violation of constitutional rights. Specifically, the act of creating a Department of Social Services to investigate and respond to allegations of child abuse may have meant that Winnebago County assumed a duty to prevent what Randy DeShaney did to Joshua DeShaney, and failure to fulfill that duty may have constituted a tort.

Dissents

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County&action=edit&section=5 "Edit section: Dissents")

The court's ruling generated two dissents. The first, by Justice William Brennan , asserted that whether the Due Process Clause gave Joshua DeShaney a constitutional right to protection against abuse was irrelevant, since it was not an argument presented to either of the lower courts or even to the Supreme Court and "no one, in short, has asked the Court to proclaim that, as a general matter, the Constitution safeguards positive as well as [negative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negati

…