holding no liability under the state-created danger doctrine for the officer's conduct reassuring the plaintiff of her safety and charging the former boyfriend on lesser charges than he'd promised after having responded to a domestic disturbance call and hearing the plaintiff express fear for herself and her children in light of the boyfriend's abusive and violent conduct and death threats that occurred on the same night
How later courts described this case
- holding no liability under the state-created danger doctrine for the officer's conduct reassuring the plaintiff of her safety and charging the former boyfriend on lesser charges than he'd promised after having responded to a domestic disturbance call and hearing the plaintiff express fear for herself and her children in light of the boyfriend's abusive and violent conduct and death threats that occurred on the same night
- stating that state actors do not “‘commit[] an affirmative act’ or ‘create[] a danger’ every time [they] do[] anything that makes injury at the hands of a third party more likely,” and that instead, would-be plaintiffs must come forward with evidence of an act “more akin to a[] [state] actor [himself] directly causing harm to the injured party”
- concluding that an officer’s assurances to the victim and his decision not to charge the assailant were not affirmative acts giving rise to civil liability because, if so, “every representation by the police and every failure to incarcerate would constitute ‘affirmative actions’ giving rise to civil liability”
- recognizing that the state’s affirmative duty to protect arises “when the state restrains persons from acting on their own behalf,” and noting that “[s]ome sort of confinement of the injured party— incarceration, institutionalization, or the like — is needed to trigger the affirmative duty” (emphasis added)
Written by the judges who cited it.
Distinguished
Distinguished by Fijalkowski v. Wheeler, 361 F. Supp. 3d 577 (2019)
Yet importantly, the Fourth Circuit in Pinder held that the state-created doctrine was inapplicable to the facts in that case.
The opinion
MOTZ, Circuit Judge,
concurring in parts I-IV of the majority opinion and in the judgment:
I concur in the result reached in the majority opinion and admire its felicity of expression. I write separately to make it clear that its sole holding is that Officer Johnson was entitled to summary judgment on his qualified immunity defense. This is so because when this tragedy occurred in 1989, in view of DeShaney v. Winnebago Dept. of Social Servs., 489 U.S. 189 , 109 S.Ct. 998 , 103 L.Ed.2d 249 (1989), a reasonable police officer could not have known that Officer Johnson’s promise to Ms. Pinder created a special relationship making him liable to her. Thus, any suggestion in part V of the majority opinion that, even today, there is not and, as a matter of policy, should not be any “broad constitutional right to affirmative protection from the state” is dicta and, in my view, erroneous dicta.