DeShaney v. Winnebago County

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, they ruled 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 exist conditions in 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.[4]

Since Joshua DeShaney was not in the custody of the DSS, 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 state law, the Fourteenth Amendment does not transform every tort by a state actor into 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 fulfil that duty may have constituted a tort.

The court's ruling generated two dissents. The first, by Associate Justice William Brennan, asserted that whether or not the Due Process Clause gave Joshua DeShaney a constitutional right to protection against abuse was a non-sequitur, 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 liberties."[5] He went on to say that Rehnquist used a flawed interpretation of the Estelle and Youngberg precedents, which Brennan held "to stand for the much more generous proposition that, if a State cuts off private sources of aid and then refuses aid itself, it cannot wash its hands of the harm that results from its inaction." [6] Finally, Brennan argued that the Wisconsin child-protection laws created a regime in which private citizens and government bodies other than a Department of Social Services had no power or role to intervene with child abuse other than notifying the DSS. As such, Brennan held that the child-protection laws constituted the same custodial "deprivation of liberty" that Rehnquist's opinion held necessary for a Due Process violation.

A second, shorter but more famous dissent was written by Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, who had (along with Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall) joined Brennan's dissent. In the first of his opinion's four paragraphs, Blackmun reiterated Brennan's contention that there had been state action in establishing a DSS that promised to provide protection against child abuse and absolved all other state and non-state actors of the responsibility or authority to act. He went on to compare the Court's ruling to the Dred Scott case, saying that in both cases the court upheld an injustice by choosing a restrictive interpretation of the Constitution and then denying that choice.

Blackmun's dissent is famous due to its fourth paragraph which is as follows:

Poor Joshua! Victim of repeated attacks by an irresponsible, bullying, cowardly, and intemperate father, and abandoned by respondents who placed him in a dangerous predicament and who knew or learned what was going on, and yet did essentially nothing except, as the Court revealingly observes, ante, at 193, "dutifully recorded these incidents in [their] files." It is a sad commentary upon American life, and constitutional principles – so full of late of patriotic fervor and proud proclamations about "liberty and justice for all" – that this child, Joshua DeShaney, now is assigned to live out the remainder of his life profoundly retarded. Joshua and his mother, as petitioners here, deserve – but now are denied by this Court – the opportunity to have the facts of their case considered in the light of the constitutional protection that 42 U.S.C. 1983 is meant to provide.[7]

President Bill Clinton quoted the "Poor Joshua!" paragraph in his remarks on Blackmun's retirement, and the DeShaney v. Winnebago dissent was, along with his authorship of the Roe v. Wade decision, the most widely referenced element of Blackmun's career in obituaries following his death. It was also quoted as the headline for Time magazine's article on the decision.[8]