Wright v. Illinois Dept. of Children & Family Services

• Decision Date: 21 November 1994
• Docket Number: No. 93-3359,93-3359
• Parties: , 10 IER Cases 87 Margaret H. WRIGHT, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN & FAMILY SERVICES, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 1492

40 F.3d 1492

63 USLW 2400, 10 IER Cases 87

Margaret H. WRIGHT, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN & FAMILY SERVICES, et al Defendants-Appellees.

No. 93-3359.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued April 19, 1994.

Decided Nov. 21, 1994.

Patricia C. Benassi (argued), Benassi & Benassi, Peoria, IL, for plaintiff-appellant.

William S. Hanley (argued), Thomas H. Wilson, Sorling, Northrup, Hanna, Cullen & Cochran, Springfield, IL, for defendants-appellees.

Before COFFEY, FLAUM, and EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judges.

FLAUM, Circuit Judge.

Margaret Wright, a social worker employed by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services ("DCFS" or "the Department"), sued the Department and thirteen individual administrators, alleging that various disciplinary actions taken against her and ordered by the defendants violated federal and state law. ¹ The district court addressed Wright's various charges in a series of orders, eventually dismissing a number of state law claims (alleging intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, defamation, and violations of the Illinois Whistle Blower Protection Act and Illinois Personnel Code) and a claim alleging conspiracy to retaliate for protected conduct in violation of 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1985(2), and granting summary judgment for the defendants on claims brought under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 asserting violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The court also concluded that the individual defendants were entitled to qualified immunity on the federal constitutional claims. Wright appeals the disposition of the First Amendment, conspiracy, and whistleblower claims. We affirm in part, reverse in part, and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

I.

In 1989, the DCFS ² first received notice that a five-year old boy, CS, had been sexually abused by his father, JS. At that time, the child's mother had begun private therapy for her son and tried to restrict JS's contact with CS through an appropriate court order. Despite these precautions, the abuse apparently continued, and in February, 1990, the family sought assistance from the DCFS. Margaret Wright served as the intake screener for CS, responsible for reviewing the reported abuse to determine what services should be offered to CS and his family. She was subsequently was assigned to be CS' follow-up case worker. ³

Wright and her supervisors quickly developed conflicting ideas as to how the case should be investigated and what conclusions should be drawn from the information that had been gathered. Over the course of several months, this conflict degenerated into open hostility--characterized by Wright accusing her supervisors of neglecting abused children and violating state law and the supervisors accusing Wright of perjury and insubordination. Eventually, the Department imposed various disciplinary measures on Wright spawning this litigation.

The voluminous recitations of facts in the parties' respective appellate briefs and the inclusion in appendices of over one thousand pages of reports and affidavits illustrate the contentiousness of this case. As Wright tells the story, the Department willfully ignored credible evidence that CS and his seven-year-old half-sister, NS, were the victims of ritualistic child abuse because they feared that the children's father, JS, would file a lawsuit. Refusing to acquiesce to the Department's position, Wright made efforts to publicize the case, which, she claims, resulted in a campaign of petty harassment against her and the imposition of discriminatory punishment by her superiors. By the Department's version, Wright stubbornly refused to accept the reasoned conclusion that no ritualistic abuse had occurred, and, having lost the internal policy battle, proceeded to orchestrate a concerted and defiant effort to subvert her supervisors' decision in the courts and the media. As we are reviewing a grant of summary judgment, we are not charged with resolving the numerous disputed factual issues that are referred to below. Our task is to determine whether or not the established facts that are not reasonably open to dispute conclusively indicate that Wright is not entitled to any relief on her claims.

In her role as follow-up case worker, Wright initially reviewed the NS case file and consulted a Chicago police expert before forming a tentative opinion that the type of abuse described by CS was indicative of ritualistic child abuse. ⁴ Wright reported this suspicion to her supervisors who soon approved her suggestion that the DCFS take custody of NS. With the cooperation of NS's mother (who was divorced from JS), DCFS gained custody of the child and obtained a court order prohibiting contact between NS and JS.

Wright alleges that in determining whether NS actually was a victim of ritualistic abuse the Department neglected to comply with a state law that required it to file a new formal abuse report, to notify JS of the allegations, and to initiate a formal investigation into the accusations. Instead, Wright charges, one of her supervisors, with the knowledge and approval of others in the chain of command, directed that she work with a state police investigator in order to develop a case against JS. No formal report was made and the Department delayed three months before notifying JS of the charges.

JS learned of the allegations on May 11, 1990, and on that day he was shot and severely wounded by Bloomington police officers who confronted him believing that he was on his way to kill NS and her mother, SS. According to Wright, while JS was in the hospital he confessed to a Bloomington police officer that he had killed babies in his kitchen during a satanic ritual. In Wright's view, this confession corroborated CS's earlier statement that he had witnessed such killings. Shortly thereafter, JS's attorney threatened to sue the City of Bloomington for excessive force and the DCFS for unlawfully failing to notify JS of the ongoing child abuse investigation. Wright insists that the credible threat of a lawsuit caused her supervisors to chill the investigation as part of a plan to placate JS and his attorney.

According to the Department, even prior to the shooting the state police investigator with whom Wright had been assigned to work had complained that Wright was conducting interviews on her own. DCFS supervisors advised Wright to cooperate with the agent and to involve him in all of her investigative activities. After the shooting, Wright contacted Bloomington police for an update on JS's condition, at which time she was told of JS's purported hospital room confession. (The Department later found this confession report not credible.) Shortly thereafter a decision was made to remove Wright from any investigative responsibility for the case but allow her to remain involved as a case worker. The Department states that it later received a report that Wright had interviewed people who were connected (albeit marginally) to the shooting incident without notifying the state police. Wright's supervisor then explicitly instructed her to involve one or another of the outside investigators in all subsequent contacts with either the children or their therapist. When the supervisors got wind of Wright's plan to visit the children at a Chicago hospital without either investigator, they relieved Wright of her role in CS's and NS's cases and barred her from making further contact with the children.

According to Wright, both the children and the investigation suffered from her absence as the Department failed to prepare evidence for court appearances and declined to further investigate the substance and accuracy of JS's bedside confession. The Department insists that it found no additional evidence to corroborate the devil-worshipping accounts provided by the young children. Wright soon took a number of actions to register her protest: (1) she wrote a series of internal memos to her immediate supervisors and to a state-level supervisor; (2) she retained an attorney; and (3) she provided information to a reporter from People Magazine who was investigating the case. Wright claims that her local supervisors again harassed her for protesting their decisions, but a state-level supervisor intervened on her behalf, ordering that Wright be reassigned to the NS and CS cases in August, 1990.

Around September, 1990, the Department received a report that BP, a niece of JS, might be at risk because of unsupervised visits with JS. Wright was called to testify in a court proceeding that resulted in the DCFS taking custody of BP. Spurred by these new allegations, the Department asked Mark Pleasant, an experienced investigator from the Lake County Children's Advocacy Center, to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the controversy over the alleged ritualistic child abuse. Wright strongly disagreed with Pleasant's investigative techniques and his substantive conclusions. Specifically, Wright states that Pleasant refused to cooperate or to share information with her during the investigation, failed to interview numerous witnesses who could have substantiated the ritualistic abuse allegations, and developed an inappropriately friendly relationship with JS and his attorney. In addition, Wright charges that Pleasant wrongly concluded that there had been no ritualistic abuse and circulated his findings--including an accusation that Wright had "subverted justice"--outside the Department in violation of DCFS procedures and state law.

In defending Pleasant's investigation, the Department notes that he interviewed dozens of witnesses and submitted a 250-page report stating his conclusions and underlying reasons. Specifically, Pleasant determined that: (1) there was insufficient evidence to conclude that satanic abuse of JS's children or others had occurred at JS's home; (2) that JS's home nevertheless presented an injurious...