Baker v. Owen

Decision Date23 April 1975
Docket NumberNo. C-74-46-G.,C-74-46-G.
CourtU.S. District Court — Middle District of North Carolina
PartiesVirginia BAKER and Russell Carl Baker, Plaintiffs, v. W. C. OWEN, Principal of Gibsonville School, et al., Defendants.

Norman B. Smith, Smith, Carrington, Patterson, Follin & Curtis, Greensboro, N. C., for plaintiffs.

Welch Jordan and William D. Caffrey, Jordan, Wright, Nichols, Caffrey & Hill, Greensboro, N. C., for defendants Owen and Langston.

John W. Hardy and Frank W. Bullock, Jr., Douglas, Ravenel, Hardy & Crihfield, Greensboro, N. C., for defendant Pearce.

Rufus L. Edmisten, Atty. Gen., of North Carolina, Andrew A. Vanore, Jr., Deputy Atty. Gen., and Raymond L. Yasser, Associate Atty. Gen., Raleigh, N. C., for defendant Edmisten.

Before CRAVEN, Circuit Judge, GORDON, Chief District Judge, and WARD, District Judge.

CRAVEN, Circuit Judge:

This three-judge court was convened to consider the claims of Russell Carl Baker and his mother that their constitutional rights were violated when Russell Carl was corporally punished by his teacher over his mother's objections and without procedural due process. Russell Carl, a sixth-grader, was paddled on December 6, 1973, for allegedly violating his teacher's announced rule against throwing kickballs except during designated play periods. Mrs. Baker had previously requested of Russell Carl's principal and certain teachers that Russell Carl not be corporally punished, because she opposed it on principle. Nevertheless, shortly after his alleged misconduct her son received two licks in the presence of a second teacher and in view of other students.

Mrs. Baker alleges that the administration of corporal punishment after her objections violated her parental right to determine disciplinary methods for her child. Russell Carl charges that the circumstances in which the punishment was administered violated his right to procedural due process, and that the punishment itself in this instance amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. This special court was convened because both Mrs. Baker in her claim and Russell Carl in his procedural due process claim have challenged the constitutionality of North Carolina General Statutes § 115-146. They claim that this statute, which empowers school officials to "use reasonable force in the exercise of lawful authority to restrain or correct pupils and to maintain order,"1 is unconstitutional insofar as it allows corporal punishment over parental objection and absent adequate procedural safeguards.

We hold that fourteenth amendment liberty embraces the right of parents generally to control means of discipline of their children, but that the state has a countervailing interest in the maintenance of order in the schools, in this case sufficient to sustain the right of teachers and school officials to administer reasonable corporal punishment for disciplinary purposes. We also hold that teachers and school officials must accord to students minimal procedural due process in the course of inflicting such punishment. We further hold that the spanking of Russell Carl in this case did not amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

I.

Defendants contend that this court was improperly convened because plaintiffs do not mount a substantial attack on the constitutionality of the statute. Defendants argue, first, that plaintiffs' claims present no substantial constitutional question; and second, that even if authorities need parental consent and certain procedures before punishing students corporally, section 115-146 would stand unscathed because it could be reinterpreted as requiring parental consent and procedural safeguards for force to be "reasonable" and authority to be "lawful."

It is true that a three-judge court is not required when a constitutional attack upon a state statute is insubstantial. Ex parte Poresky, 290 U.S. 30, 54 S.Ct. 3, 78 L.Ed. 152 (1933); see Gonzalez v. Automatic Employees Credit Union, 419 U.S. 90, 95 S.Ct. 289, 42 L.Ed.2d 249 (1974). Goosby v. Osser, 409 U.S. 512, 93 S.Ct. 854, 35 L.Ed.2d 36 (1973), states the insubstantiality standard:

"Constitutional insubstantiality" for this purpose has been equated with such concepts as "essentially fictitious," . . . "wholly insubstantial," . . . "obviously frivolous," . . and "obviously without merit," . .. The limiting words "wholly" and "obviously" have cogent legal significance. . . . A claim is insubstantial only if "`its unsoundness so clearly results from the previous decisions of this court as to foreclose the subject and leave no room for the inference that the questions sought to be raised can be the subject of controversy.'"

409 U.S. at 518, 93 S.Ct. at 858 (citations omitted). Plaintiffs' claims in this suit are certainly not "wholly insubstantial" or "obviously frivolous." No Supreme Court decision forecloses them — quite the contrary, it is upon several such decisions that plaintiffs base their attack against the North Carolina practice. Moreover, lower federal courts that have considered claims similar to plaintiffs' have not found their disposition self-evident, see, e. g., Glaser v. Marietta, 351 F.Supp. 555 (W.D.Pa.1972), nor do we. We therefore reject defendants' first argument.

Defendants' second argument is elusive. They would have us see the questioned statute as infinitely malleable, its phrases "reasonable force" and "lawful authority" capable of connoting whatever constitutional restrictions a court might impose on the infliction of corporal punishment. Viewed this way the statute appears beyond constitutional reproach: a decision that parental consent or certain procedures are prerequisites to corporal punishment would simply pour new meaning into the statutory adjectives "reasonable" and "lawful." Thus, they argue, plaintiffs' real contention is that the defendant school officials have used unreasonable force and exercised unlawful authority in inflicting physical punishment over parental consent and without adequate procedural safeguards.

In their statutory context, however, the words "reasonable" and "lawful" do not seem intended to perform the function assigned them by defendants. Defendants would liken them to the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Constitution, whose words embody an ever greater number of concepts as courts constantly revise their ideas of what process is "due" and what application of the laws "equal." But the statute's words are, of course, not in a constitution. Instead, they seem to us to embody no more than the traditional tort concepts that a person privileged to use force can use only the force necessary under the circumstances, i. e., reasonable force, and that he can use force only for the purpose for which he is granted the privilege, i. e., pursuant to his lawful authority. Viewed this way, the statute can be paraphrased to say that school officials in North Carolina are empowered by the legislature to use whatever force necessary under the circumstances for the limited purposes of correcting their pupils and maintaining order.

With the statute so construed, it is clearly subject to the attack made by plaintiffs. Indeed, defendants argue in their briefs and oral argument that school officials can corporally punish pupils over parental objections and without antecedent procedural safeguards. They have alluded to the statute as authority for their position, and have cited us to state court cases and an eminent North Carolina treatise as evidence that state policy under this statute has long given school officials such power. Thus there is no disputing that the statute allows the practices that plaintiffs challenge, or that school officials acting pursuant to their authority under the statute engage in those practices.

Thus this case differs from Phillips v. United States, 312 U.S. 246, 61 S.Ct. 480, 85 L.Ed. 800 (1941), relied upon by defendants. There the United States had sought an injunction from a single district judge against a state governor who had declared martial law in an effort to block construction of a federal project. The governor claimed that only a three-judge court could hear the suit for injunction, because he claimed justification for his actions in state constitutional provisions making him Commander-in-Chief of the militia and statutes granting him broad police powers. Noting that "in its complaint the United States did not impugn the validity of these state provisions," the Supreme Court held a three-judge court unnecessary because "an attack on lawless exercise of authority in a particular case is not an attack upon the constitutionality of a statute conferring the authority even though a misreading of the statute is invoked as justification." 312 U.S. at 252, 61 S.Ct. at 484.

In this case, unlike Phillips, plaintiffs directly attack the constitutionality of a state statute, and the statute, again unlike Phillips, has always been read to authorize the conduct of which they complain. Cf. Query v. United States, 316 U.S. 486, 62 S.Ct. 1122, 86 L.Ed. 1616 (1942). Plaintiffs seek "to interpose the Constitution against enforcement of a state policy," which is precisely the situation that the Court in Phillips said requires a three-judge court. 312 U.S. at 251, 61 S.Ct. at 483. In this respect this case is like the recent Supreme Court case of Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565, 95 S.Ct. 729, 42 L.Ed.2d 725 (1975). In Goss a three-judge court was required to hear a challenge to a state statute that gave school authorities the power to suspend pupils. The basis of the challenge was that the statute allowed suspensions without procedural safeguards, and that the policy of officials acting under the statute was to suspend without such safeguards. See 419 U.S. at 567, 584, 95 S. Ct. 729, 42 L.Ed.2d 725. Here the assertion is that the North Carolina statute allows corporal punishment without parental consent and adequate procedures, and...

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  • Ingraham v. Wright, No. 73--2078
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    • U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit
    • January 8, 1976
    ...which Fourteenth Amendment due process standards should be applied. In its argument for procedural safeguards, the dissent relies on Baker v. Owen, supra, a three-judge district court judgment summarily affirmed by the Supreme Court. In Baker, the three-judge district court upheld a North C......
  • State v. Young
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    ...the state must be permitted to exercise over the person of the student in order to accomplish its valid state ends. Baker v. Owen, 395 F.Supp. 294 (M.D.N.C., 1975). In short, we see no conflict between the Supreme Court's rulings and our decision today that the restraints placed by the Four......
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