Joshua DeShaney v. Winnebago Dept. of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989)

CASE: Mother sues defendant department on behalf of son who was left profoundly retarded by the repeated beatings of his father even after the department knew about ongoing abuse in the father's household.

FACTS: In March 1984, Randy DeShaney beat his 4-year-old son Joshua so severely that he fell into a life-threatening coma. The boy's injuries left him so brain-damaged that he is expected to live out the remainder of his life in an institution for the profoundly retarded. The local social services agency had been made aware of the abuse the boy was suffering at the hands of his father, based on the boy's past visits to the emergency room with suspicious injuries and reports from his father's former girlfriend. The agency, DSS, failed to take the boy out of the home. After the beating which left the boy in the coma, his mother filed a civil rights claim against the agency, alleging that it had deprived Joshua of his liberty without due process of law. The D.C. granted summary judgment for the social workers; the Seventh Circuit affirmed.

HOLDING: Social service agency's failure to remove boy from home of abusive father even after its workers had recorded concrete evidence of injuries sustained at the father's hands did not violate the boy's right to liberty under the due process clause because he had no constitutionally protected right under the Fourteenth Amendment to be free from harm against private actors.

RATIONALE:

• Nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause requires the state to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors.
• State had no affirmative duty under the Due Process Clause to provide its citizens with particular protective services, therefore, it cannot be held liable under the Clause for injuries that could have been averted had it chosen to provide them.
• The state had no affirmative duty outside the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the boy because it had no "special relationship" with him; that is, they had not denied him freedom to act on his own behalf.
• The state does not become the permanent guarantor of an individual's safety by having once offered him shelter.

DISSENT (Brennan, Marshall, Blackmun): Because of the structure of Wisconsin's child-welfare system (in which citizens, police and other agencies report all cases of suspected abuse to the DSS), Joshua and children like him have a special reliance on the DSS. Without the agency's intervention, children in these situations are left to be prisoners in abusive homes. In this case, oppression resulted when a state undertakes a vital duty then ignores it.

Blackmun: The Court engages in a formalist analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment, attempting to draw a rigid line between action and inaction, that the passage of the amendment was aimed at undoing. Blackmun was adopt a more "sympathetic" reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, one that "comports with dictates of fundamental justice and recognizes that compassion need not be exiled rom the province of judging."

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