Hicks v. Clark
Decision Date | 04 June 2015 |
Docket Number | Case No. 13 C 989 |
Citation | 107 F.Supp.3d 905 |
Parties | Christopher Hicks, Plaintiff, v. Barry Clark, et al., Defendants. |
Court | U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois |
Jonathan I. Loevy, Rachel Steinback, Arthur R. Loevy, Elizabeth N. Mazur, Michael I. Kanovitz, Roshna Bala Keen, Loevy & Loevy, Chicago, IL, Attorney for Plaintiff.
Barbara Lynn Greenspan, Michaelina Gianaris Camp, Patricia L. Llacsa, Illinois Attorney General's Office, Chicago, IL, Attorney for Defendant.
Just short of four decades have elapsed since Christopher Hicks ("Hicks") was appallingly returned to the custody of his adoptive mother Gloria Jemmison ("Jemmison") despite the unquestioned and serious child abuse that he had sustained at her hands and that had led to Department's originally ousting her from such custody only a few months earlier. And even more appallingly, that pattern of grievous physical abuse not only resumed immediately but actually worsened during the next few years—abuse that was fully documented and well known to Department and its cohorts2 —until Jemmison's custody of Hicks was finally revoked permanently.3 According to Hicks, his long-repressed memory of that deplorable situation has emerged from the depths of despond only recently, and he seeks recompense for that horrific experience through this 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (" Section 1983") action, coupled with related state law claims under the auspices of the supplemental jurisdiction provision of 28 U.S.C. § 1367.
At this point the most recent reiteration of Hicks' claims is embodied in his TAC,4 and the two sets of defendants have taken aim at that pleading by separate motions. Because the motion by Department and its cohorts advanced a "Gotcha!" type of argument of qualified immunity that sought to rest on a similar child abuse case that rejected legal responsibility on the part of a Wisconsin state agency (DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dep't of Soc. Servs., 489 U.S. 189, 109 S.Ct. 998, 103 L.Ed.2d 249 (1989) ), this Court's immediate response was to focus defense counsel's attention on the obvious proposition that it was totally improper to judge defendants' conduct during the 1970s and very early 1980s by a standard not announced by the United States Supreme Court until a decade later—a kind of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" approach.5
Indeed, startlingly enough, it was DeShaney itself—in both the majority opinion authored by then Chief Justice Rehnquist and the powerful dissent voiced by Justice Brennan for himself and two other justices6 —that pointed the way toward upholding rather than rejecting Hicks' TAC here: Each of those opinions expressly adverted to Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 97 S.Ct. 285, 50 L.Ed.2d 251 (1976) and the later (and conceptually parallel) decision in Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 102 S.Ct. 2452, 73 L.Ed.2d 28 (1982) as exemplifying the law as of the time that is relevant for evaluation of the litigants' rights and duties in this case. Because that reasoning is so dramatically demonstrated by those two opinions, which led to disagreement within the Supreme Court in DeShaney but both of which really call for upholding Hicks' claim here, this opinion will quote extensively from the Justices' respective expositions (omitting internal citations, quotation marks and footnotes).
First, then, here is a slightly (but not substantively) bobtailed reproduction of the now-relevant portions of Chief Justice Rehnquist's statement in DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 198–200, 109 S.Ct. 998 (emphasis added):
And here is the identical lesson that Justice Brennan drew in DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 205, 109 S.Ct. 998 from Estelle and its later compatriot Youngberg:
Both Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 97 S.Ct. 285, 50 L.Ed.2d 251 (1976), and Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 102 S.Ct. 2452, 73 L.Ed.2d 28 (1982), began by emphasizing that the States had confined J.W. Gamble to prison and Nicholas Romeo to a psychiatric hospital. This initial action rendered these people helpless to help themselves or to seek help from persons unconnected to the government. See Estelle, supra, at 104, 97 S.Ct. 285 (); at 104 (); Youngberg, supra, at 317, 102 S.Ct. 2452 (). Cases from the lower courts also recognize that a State's actions can be decisive in assessing the constitutional significance of subsequent inaction. For these purposes, moreover, actual physical restraint is not the only state action that has been considered relevant.
Indeed, Chief Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion recognized that other courts have found a parallel between the teaching of Estelle and Youngberg and the situation posed for consideration in this case. Here is the relevant portion of n.9 to that opinion (489 U.S. at 201, 109 S.Ct. 998, citations omitted):
Had the state by the affirmative exercise of its power removed Joshua from free society and placed him in a foster home operated by its agents, we might have a situation sufficiently analogous to incarceration or institutionalization to give rise to an affirmative duty to protect. Indeed, several Courts of Appeals have held, by analogy to Estelle and Youngberg, that the State may be held liable under the Due Process Clause for failing to protect children in foster homes from mistreatment at the hands of their foster parents.
Although the Supreme Court majority did not opine "on the validity of this analogy," this Court holds that defendants can...
To continue reading
Request your trial