Burch v. Apalachee Community Mental Health Services, Inc.

• Decision Date: 03 December 1986
• Docket Number: No. 85-3843,85-3843
• Citation: 804 F.2d 1549
• Parties: Darrell BURCH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. APALACHEE COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES, INC., et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

Page 1549

804 F.2d 1549

55 USLW 2330

Darrell BURCH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. APALACHEE COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES, INC., et al Defendants-Appellees.

No. 85-3843.

United States Court of Appeals Eleventh Circuit.

Dec. 3, 1986.

Richard M. Powers, Tallahassee, Fla., for plaintiff-appellant.

Robert C. Crabtree, Lloyd Monroe, Tallahassee, Fla., for Apalachee Community Mental Health.

Walter M. Meginniss, Asst. Atty. Gen., Eric J. Taylor, Tallahassee, Fla., for Williams, Potter, Parker, Sweet, McCormich, Pandya, Chou, Harrison, Daniel, and Stephens.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida.

Before GODBOLD and TJOFLAT, Circuit Judges, and TUTTLE, Senior circuit judge.

TJOFLAT, Circuit Judge:

In this case plaintiff presents us with a claim that the State of Florida deprived him of his constitutional right to due process of law by confining him in a hospital for the mentally ill without a judicial hearing to determine his need for hospitalization. The district court found that plaintiff failed to state a claim for which relief can be granted. We now affirm.

I.

On December 7, 1981, an unidentified citizen found Darrell Burch wandering on the highway. Concerned for Burch, this citizen took him to the Apalachee Community Mental Health Services, Inc., (ACMHS), a facility designated to receive patients suffering from mental illnesses. Upon his arrival, Burch was confused and disoriented; one evaluation form states that Burch thought he was in heaven. At the request of ACMHS, Burch signed a voluntary admission form and an authorization for treatment form. ¹

ACMHS diagnosed Burch as having paranoid schizophrenia and began to give him psychotropic drugs. The facility lacked the ability to give Burch the full treatment he needed, however, and transferred him to the Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, Florida (FSH) on December 10, 1981. Before transferring Burch, ACMHS had Burch sign a form requesting voluntary admission to FSH, along with a form authorizing treatment at FSH.

Upon his arrival at FSH, that facility also had him sign a request for voluntary admission form, despite the fact that he remained in a psychotic state. On December 23, 1981, FSH had Burch sign another authorization of treatment form. FSH kept Burch as a patient until May 7, 1982, allegedly against his will.

Burch subsequently sued ACMHS and the FSH employees (Employees) who were connected with his admission or treatment. ² Burch alleged that these defendants had confined and treated him against his will, without any judicial determination of his need for treatment as required by Florida law and the United States Constitution. Burch alleged that the defendants had deprived him of his liberty without due process of law and sought relief under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 (1982). ³

All of the defendants moved the district court to dismiss Burch's complaint for failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted. The district court granted their motion, holding that under Parratt v. Taylor, 451 U.S. 527, 101 S.Ct. 1908, 68 L.Ed.2d 420 (1981), overruled on other grounds, Daniels v. Williams, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 662, 88 L.Ed.2d 662 (1986), Florida's post-deprivation procedures satisfied the requirements of due process and precluded a section 1983 action. ⁴ Burch now appeals. As did the district court, we take the material allegations of Burch's complaint as true and construe them liberally in his favor. See Fundiller v. City of Cooper City, 777 F.2d 1436, 1439 (11th Cir.1985).

II.

At the time that Burch was in defendants' care, Florida law mandated a certain procedure for the emergency admission of mental health patients. See Fla.Stat. Sec. 394.463(1) (1981) (amended 1984). This procedure allowed a mental health facility to provide emergency, involuntary treatment to a patient if the patient met certain criteria. ⁵ Within forty-eight hours of the patient's admission, however, the facility had to release the patient, get his voluntary "express and informed consent to evaluation or treatment," or initiate "a proceeding for court-ordered evaluation or involuntary placement." Fla.Stat. Sec. 394.463(1)(d) (1981) (amended 1982). A patient could enter (or remain in) a facility voluntarily if he "ma[de] application by express and informed consent for admission." Fla.Stat. Sec. 394.465(1)(a) (1981).

Taking Burch's allegations as true, we cannot doubt that he has a colorable claim that the defendants failed to follow the statutory procedure. The Supreme Court's decision in Pennhurst State School & Hospital v. Halderman, 465 U.S. 89, 104 S.Ct. 900, 79 L.Ed.2d 67 (1984), however, held that the eleventh amendment bars a federal court from granting relief against state officials on the ground that they violated state law. Thus, a plaintiff seeking federal relief against state officials must allege and prove a violation of the United States Constitution or of a federal law. Burch grounds his complaint in the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment, urging us to hold that the State deprived him of an unspecified substantive right or failed to grant him adequate procedures. We cannot comply.

The due process clause of the fourteenth amendment gives rise to three types of claims: (1) for violations of incorporated provisions of the Bill of Rights; (2) for violations of the substantive component of the due process clause; and (3) for violations of procedural due process. See Daniels v. Williams, --- U.S. ----, ----, 106 S.Ct. 662, 679, 88 L.Ed.2d 662 (1986) (Stevens, J., concurring); Gilmere v. City of Atlanta, 774 F.2d 1495, 1499-1502 (11th Cir.1985) (en banc), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 1970, 90 L.Ed.2d 654 and --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 1993, 90 L.Ed.2d 673 (1986) (allowing recovery under Sec. 1983 on two theories: violations of substantive due process and of the fourth amendment). Properly construed, Burch's claim falls in the third category.

An individual has a protected liberty interest in remaining free from long-term mental institutionalization until he voluntarily seeks help or is involuntarily committed after a hearing. See Addington v. Texas, 441 U.S. 418, 425, 99 S.Ct. 1804, 1809, 60 L.Ed.2d 323 (1979) (the Supreme Court "repeatedly has recognized that civil commitment for any purpose constitutes a significant deprivation of liberty that requires due process protection") (citations omitted); see also Vitek v. Jones, 445 U.S. 480, 100 S.Ct. 1254, 63 L.Ed.2d 552 (1980) (prisoner entitled to procedural safeguards before being transferred to mental institution). If the state follows the proper procedures, its confinement of an individual in need of care to a mental rehabilitation facility does not infringe upon any substantive right. See Vitek v. Jones, 445 U.S. 480, 100 S.Ct. 1254, 63 L.Ed.2d 552 (1980); Addington v. Texas, 441 U.S. 418, 99 S.Ct. 1804, 60 L.Ed.2d 323 (1979); cf. Gilmere, 774 F.2d at 1500 (defining substantive due process claims as those which "allege that certain governmental conduct would remain unjustified even if it were accompanied by the most stringent of procedural safeguards"). In this case, Burch cannot claim that the State of Florida lacked the constitutional power to place him, even involuntarily, into a hospital for treatment of his mental illness. Nor do we find in Burch's complaint any nonconclusory allegation that the governing boards or supervisory employees at ACMHS or FSH had a policy or regular practice of ignoring the State's regulations concerning the admission of patients needing mental care. ⁶ Thus, we read Burch's complaint as alleging that ACMHS and Employees, by willfully ⁷ confining and treating him without a valid consent, deprived him of his procedural due process right to a judicial hearing.

III.

The fourteenth amendment is not "a font of tort law to be superimposed upon whatever systems may already be administered by the States." Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S. 693, 701, 96 S.Ct. 1155, 1160, 47 L.Ed.2d 405 (1976). To prevent turning the due process clause into a mere duplication of the common law tort system, the Supreme Court in Parratt v. Taylor, 451 U.S. 527, 101 S.Ct. 1908, 68 L.Ed.2d 420 (1981), overruled on other grounds, Daniels v. Williams, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 662, 88 L.Ed.2d 662 (1986), explained the circumstances under which a state could be found to have deprived an individual of his right to procedural due process.

In Parratt, a state prisoner sued the prison warden for allegedly depriving him of his property without due process of law. The plaintiff claimed that the warden's action, negligently losing a hobby kit that the plaintiff had ordered through the mail, entitled him to relief under section 1983. The Supreme Court disagreed. Implicitly holding that the defendants had not deprived the plaintiff of any substantive due process right, ⁸ the Parratt Court found that the plaintiff's claim was one for a negligent deprivation of procedural due process. The Court then stated that "the impracticality of providing any meaningful predeprivation process, when coupled with the availability of some meaningful means by which to assess the propriety of the State's action at some time after the initial taking, can satisfy the requirements of procedural due process." Parratt, 451 U.S. at 539, 101 S.Ct. at 1915 (footnote omitted). Determining that the State could not provide any "meaningful predeprivation process" if it could not predict when its employees would violate its own law and that the State offered a sufficient postdeprivation remedy in the state courts, the Court held that the State had not deprived the plaintiff of procedural due process. ⁹

In Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 104 S.Ct. 3194, 82 L.Ed.2d 393 (1984), the Supreme Court extended Parratt, holding that Parratt's reasoning also applied to intentional deprivations of property. In Hudson, a state prisoner sued a prison officer for allegedly destroying some of his...