Long v. Armstrong Cnty., Civil Action No. 2:15-cv-1447

• Decision Date: 31 May 2016
• Docket Number: Civil Action No. 2:15-cv-1447
• Citation: 189 F.Supp.3d 502
• Parties: Tara L. Long, et al, Plaintiffs, v. Armstrong County, et al, Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Western District of Pennsylvania

189 F.Supp.3d 502

Tara L. Long, et al, Plaintiffs,

v.Armstrong County, et al, Defendants.

Civil Action No. 2:15-cv-1447

United States District Court, W.D. Pennsylvania.

Signed May 31, 2016

Claire McGee, George M. Kontos, Kontos Mengine Law Group, Pittsburgh, PA, for Plaintiffs.

David J. MacMain, MacMain Law Group LLC, Malvern, PA, for Defendants.

OPINION

Mark R. Hornak, United States District Judge

What happened to Tammy Long was unspeakable. Her estate and family allege that what the Defendant County did was inexcusable. The question here is whether federal civil rights law provides a remedy to the Plaintiffs. For the reasons that follow, the Court is constrained to conclude that it does not.

Tammy E. Long was a resident of Kittanning Pennsylvania, a Pennsylvania municipality that also houses the Armstrong County Jail ("Jail"). Ms. Long lived with Mr. Terry Slagle, and the two shared a residence located about a quarter mile from the Jail. Robert Crissman was an inmate at the Jail, incarcerated for violating his parole (stemming from an earlier arrest and criminal disposition).¹ Mr. Crissman is alleged to have had a lengthy criminal history, including prior incarcerations or probation for various theft, trespassing, breaking and entering, and drug related offenses. Mr. Crissman was also a member of the Jail's work-release program, called the "Trustee Program," in which inmates performed various Jail-operation tasks and in return were granted special freedoms and privileges. Oftentimes, these tasks were performed without direct physical supervision and/or outside the confines of the Jail building. Further, members of the Trustee Program were given dark green uniforms that looked like civilian clothing. Upon his request, Mr. Crissman was assigned "tray duty" through the Trustee Program; it was Mr. Crissman's job to wait outside the Jail for a van delivering meals on trays, and to help unload these trays into the Jail.

On July 30, 2015, seven days after Mr. Crissman was locked up, he and another inmate were waiting outside of the Jail walls for the food van to arrive. The inmates were not accompanied by any guards or other Jail personnel—they were only watched by an officer in the Jail control room who could observe the inmates by camera. As the food van arrived, Mr. Crissman ran from the Jail and fled to the home of Mr. Slagle and Ms. Long. Mr. Slagle was an acquaintance of Mr. Crissman, but neither Mr. Slagle nor Ms. Long were aware that Mr. Crissman had just escaped from the Jail. Sometime thereafter, Mr. Slagle left the residence to go to work, and Ms. Long agreed to give Mr. Crissman a ride into the city. It was then that Mr. Crissman beat and murdered Ms. Long in her residence.

Plaintiffs, the Administrators of the Estate of Ms. Long, now bring suit against Armstrong County, Armstrong County Jail, and David Hogue (the warden of the Jail), alleging claims via 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violation of the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause, and separately under Pennsylvania Wrongful Death and Survival Acts. This Court's jurisdiction over any state law claim is dependent upon the existence of a valid federal claim. As such, that claim must be addressed first.

Plaintiffs § 1983 claims are brought under the "state-created danger" doctrine. Essentially, this doctrine allows a plaintiff to recover against the government when the government affirmatively uses its authority in a way that foreseeably endangers a specific class of plaintiffs. In the Third Circuit, a meritorious "state-created danger" claim requires plaintiffs to meet a four-part test:

(1) the harm ultimately caused to the plaintiff was foreseeable and fairly direct;

(2) the state-actor acted in willful disregard for the plaintiff's safety;

(3) there was some relationship between the state and the plaintiff; and

(4) the state-actor used his authority to create an opportunity for danger that otherwise would not have existed.

Phillips v. Cty. of Allegheny , 515 F.3d 224, 235 (3d Cir.2008). This case poses a number of vexing questions about the application of the state-created danger analysis. Does the act of conferring Trustee status and/or providing Mr. Crissman with civilian-style clothing constitute an "affirmative act" on the part of the local government?²

Is it foreseeable for an escaped inmate to beat and murder an individual in the surrounding community, and do the actions of Armstrong County and the Jail "shock the conscience"?³ (And, for that matter, what does it mean for conduct to "shock the conscience"?)⁴ The Court need not resolve these complicated questions, however, because Ms. Long was not a member of a discrete class of persons subjected to the alleged harm under the third prong of the state-created danger test. Instead, the state actions alleged here created a danger to the general public. Such actions do not permit recovery under the state-created danger theory.

Under the third prong of the state-created danger test, Plaintiffs must show that there is "some contact such that the plaintiff was a foreseeable victim of the defendant's acts in a tort sense" Phillips , 515 F.3d at 242 (quoting Morse v. Lower Merion Sch. Dist. , 132 F.3d 902, 912 (3d Cir.1997) ). Such a plaintiff can be either a "specific person or a [member of a] specific class of persons" so long as the person/class was somehow related to the harm brought about by the governments actions. Morse , 132 F.3d at 913.

As such, "those instances where the state actor creates only a threat to the general population" are excluded from the reach of the state-created danger liability theory. Id. See also Rivas v. City of Passaic , 365 F.3d 181, 197 (3d Cir.2004) ("[T]he relationship must be sufficiently close to exclude those instances where the state actor creates only a threat to the general population, but not so restrictive as to limit the scope of § 1983 to those instances where a specific individual is placed in danger"). When the "state actor has allegedly created a danger towards the public generally, rather than an individual or group of individuals, holding a state actor liable for the injuries of [even] foreseeable plaintiffs would expand the scope of the state-created danger theory beyond its useful and intended limits." Morse , 132 F.3d at 913 n. 12. On the other hand, where "the allegedly unlawful acts of the state actor affect only a limited group of potential plaintiffs, the potentially broad reach of the state-created danger theory is constrained by examining whether the plaintiff or plaintiffs were ‘foreseeable’ victims." Id. See also Crockett v. Se. Pennsylvania Transp. Ass'n , 2013 WL 2983117, at *6 (E.D.Pa. June 14, 2013), aff'd sub nom. Crockett v. Se. Pennsylvania Transp. Auth. , 591 Fed.Appx. 65 (3d Cir.2015) ( "Foreseeability alone, therefore, is not sufficient to establish a discrete class; the plaintiff must be part of a limited group of potential plaintiffs.").

Plaintiffs contend that the harm created by the state's actions subjected a discrete class of persons, apart from the public in general, to harm—namely, "residents in close proximity of the Armstrong County Jail."⁵ ECF No. 14, at 10. However, this class definition does not identify a subset of the "general population" that faced a specific, and specifically foreseeable, threat of harm at the hands of the state.⁶ Instead, the alleged actions of Armstrong County and the Jail created a threat to the "general population" or "public at large." As explained by the Third Circuit, such threats to the general population are not actionable under the state-created danger theory of liability. Morse , 132 F.3d at 913.

How do we know that inadequate prison security measures create only a threat to the public generally (rather than some specific or discrete class of plaintiffs)? The Third Circuit told us in Commonwealth Bank and Trust Co. v. Russell , 825 F.2d 12 (3d Cir.1987) —a case in which the Third Circuit analyzed an almost parallel factual scenario and determined that the plaintiff could not recover against the government. In Russell , the plaintiff alleged that an inmate at Potter County (PA) Jail was imprisoned on charges of homicide, burglary, robbery and theft. Id. at 13. According to the Russell complaint, the prison's confinement measures and officer training were severely deficient; for example, prison officials never conducted a head-count when the prisoners were returned to their cells after recreation because a number of locks in the cell block area were inoperable. Id. These deficient conditions allowed an inmate to escape the prison, either by using a ladder and horseshoes to climb over a "deteriorating" wall or by accessing unsecured windows to get to the roof of the Jail. Id. After this inmate escaped, he stole a gun and murdered citizens of the surrounding Potter County community. Id.

The Russell plaintiffs contended that the unsafe conditions of the jail "created a situation that posed an immediate threat to the life and safety of individuals, such as the [murder victims], who resided in the community surrounding the jail." Id. at 16. The Third Circuit, however, rejected this argument. Citing the Supreme Court's decision in Martinez v. California , 444 U.S. 277, 100 S.Ct. 553, 62 L.Ed.2d 481 (1980),⁷ the Russell Court held that the plaintiff's claims "must fail because the residents in the communities surrounding the jail are part of the ‘public at large.’ " Russell , 825 F.2d at 16. Since the defendants (the prison and county officials) had "no knowledge of danger peculiar to the [murder victims], as distinguished from other members of the general public" the plaintiffs could not "reasonably be characterized as individuals who defendants knew ‘faced any special danger.’ " Id. at 15–16.⁸

And, indeed, Plaintiffs all but concede that if Russell is still controlling law, their claims would fail.⁹ Instead, Plaintiffs argue that "Russell is inapplicable to the case at bar" because it was decided before the Third...