Here's the opinion (which affirms Judge Bloom) by Chief Judge Pryor. The intro:
This appeal requires us to decide whether the district court erred when it dismissed a civil-rights action filed by students present at the Parkland school shooting. The students sued Broward County and five public officials on the theory that their response to the school shooting was so incompetent that it violated the students’ substantive rights under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The district court dismissed this claim with prejudice because it was an impermissible shotgun pleading and, in the alternative, because it failed to state a claim and leave to amend it would be futile. On the merits, the district court reasoned that because the students were not in a custodial relationship with the officials and failed to allege conduct by the officials that is “arbitrary” or “shocks the conscience,” the students could not maintain a claim that the officials violated their substantive right to due process of law. The students appeal this decision, but settled caselaw makes clear that official acts of negligence or even incompetence in this setting do not violate the right to due process of law.
Because we agree with the district court that the students failed to state a claim of a constitutional violation and that leave to amend would be futile, we affirm.
5 comments:
This is the bit that troubles me:
". . .because the students were not in a custodial relationship with the officials . . ."
OK, fine. It is not a "custodial" relationship in the same way that a county jail prisoner is in a custodial relationship. But it is a COMPELLED relationship, and if you doubt it, try keeping your 14-year-old out of school for a month and see what happens.
J. Bloom, and now the Eleventh, have made explicit what we always knew to be true: The state can compel your minor child to be in a certain place at certain times, but the state bears no enforceable responsibility to protect their safety in that place or time. (And, indeed, the state can and does outlaw many steps the adults present there might otherwise take to ensure your child's safety.)
Combine this with the holdings in DeShaney vs. Winnebago and Town of Castle Rock vs. Gonzales and you have the worst of all possible worlds: Children subject to the compulsion of the state, without the protection of the state, surrounded by adults prohibited by the state from offering that protection.
There's a name for a system that maximizes state power while minimizing state responsibility.
Last I checked, you are not compelled to send you children to government schools. You can homeschool or send your children to charter or private school. You may even be able to get the state to subsidies your children's private school tuition if that is the route you choose.
Calm yourself, Chicken Little.
Well, anonymous name-caller at 2:35, here's the thing:
Many (most?) folks don't have the wherewithal to send their kids to private school, or to keep one spouse home for homeschooling. [Kudos on your good fortune if you're one who can.]
No, many (most?) folks have to send their kids to the public school for which they likewise are compelled to pay taxes. Hence, many (most?) of the kids who died in Parkland that day were, under any meaning of the word, compelled to be there. My simple suggestion is that if the state can require a child to be someplace, then the state ought to be accountable for that child's safety -- or, at the least, get out of the way of those who would be.
You see, I think policy decisions ought to be applicable to and equitable for even those people who cannot afford private schools.
Or are you of those folks who cannot understand what all the fuss is about from those who've lost their livelihoods thanks to government-imposed Covid 19 restrictions? After all, if they don't like working in their home office here, why don't they just work from their home office in the cabin in North Carolina, right?
Ok Mr. Kuntz, so let's play your theory out then. If the state should be accountable for the safety of these children in the Parkland shooting case (i.e. pay damages), should the state be accountable for other losses suffered by children in school too? Should the state pay damages every time a student gets a black eye because of a fist fight? Or pay damages when a student has something stolen? It certainly appears to be the logical extension of your argument.
I fear, having read your other writings, that your answer is going to be something to the effect that "no, the state shouldn't pay damages and that instead children shouldn't be compelled to go to school and/or teachers should be armed for the protection of the children." If that's your response, it's likely that you and I will never ever agree.
Whatever your response may be, I will not comment further and I will let you have the last word, if you choose to have it.
It’s a little odd for me to correspond with an anonymous person who has “read [my] other writings,” but sure, I’ll play. [So long as David doesn’t mind his comments section being hijacked.]
Start with the fact that slippery slope arguments are a poor refuge. The slippery slope of the slippery slope is that it can be an argument against essentially everything, an argument in opposition to ever doing anything. (“You say there should be speed limits in school zones?! Well that’s a slippery slope to a law requiring people to get out and push their cars past schools!”) My suggestion that the police and public schools should be held to account when their blatant negligence and abject failure directly results in the deaths of a dozen students hardly implies a civil action every time a student’s pencil case goes missing. You call that a “logical extension” (because you have to to make a slippery slope argument), but it’s not a logical extension, it’s silly.
Yes, I think the right to self-defense is God-given and inalienable and carries with it a right to the tools and practices that make self-defense viable. No school shooter was ever deterred by the “no guns” sign at the door. School staff with the right training should be empowered to defend themselves and their students – Parkland clearly demonstrated that they cannot count on anyone else to do so.
You’re wrong, though, on your two other assumptions about my position:
First, I have no cavil with compulsory education. I think choices should be more widely available, but at the bottom, every family should have access to a quality education, paid for with public funds, and children to a certain age should be required to attend. (That’s to the benefit of society at large, and for the sake of the dignity of the child.) But that compulsory feature does carry with it, by “logical extension,” the notion that if the state is going to make a child be in a certain place at a certain time, they ought to be required to make that place as safe as it can reasonably be made. And one way we enforce the requirement to “make a place safe” in our system is through litigation that punishes those who fail in that duty.
That’s why you’re wrong about my position in a second way: I do think the state should be liable in these extreme instances. Sovereign immunity is a dubious proposition to begin with, but the degree to which it has been extended amounts to a license for wanton misconduct, to say nothing of a shield for negligence. (There is now precious little a police officer can do in uniform for which he or his department can be meaningfully held to account.) The state has far more power over individuals’ lives than does any other individual. How can it be that such power is exempt from responsibility? (C.f. Peter Parker's Uncle Ben. See also Voltaire.)
There’s a Bastiat quote that comes to mind (you have me down, rightly, for a libertarian, so I didn’t want to disappoint):
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
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