Wright v. City of Ozark

• Decision Date: 26 September 1983
• Docket Number: No. 82-7213,82-7213
• Citation: 715 F.2d 1513
• Parties: Leeanne WRIGHT, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. The CITY OF OZARK, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

Page 1513

715 F.2d 1513

Leeanne WRIGHT, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. The CITY OF OZARK, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 82-7213.

United States Court of Appeals Eleventh Circuit.

Sept. 26, 1983.

Julian McPhillips, Jr., Montgomery, Ala., for plaintiffs-appellants.

Copeland, Franco, Screws & Gill, Robert D. Segall, Montgomery, Ala., for Nicholson, Benefield and Blackmon.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.

Before TJOFLAT, HILL and JOHNSON, Circuit Judges.

TJOFLAT, Circuit Judge:

On the evening of December 29, 1981, Leeanne Wright was raped by an unknown assailant in Ozark, Alabama. Wright subsequently brought this action for damages under 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 & 1985(3) (Supp. V 1981) against the City of Ozark, the mayor of Ozark, the Chief of Police, and a member of the police department. Wright alleged, inter alia, that the defendants had deliberately suppressed information of prior rapes in Ozark in order not to jeopardize business and commercial activity in the city. She alleged that had the defendants not suppressed this information, she would have become aware of it, and she would not have been in the high-crime area where she was raped on the night of the rape. She claimed that the defendants' actions violated her rights under the due process and equal protection clauses of the fourteenth amendment. The district court dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim for relief under either sections 1983 or 1985(3). We affirm.

We assume that all facts alleged in Wright's complaint are true. Further, we recognize that "a complaint should not be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief." Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 45-46, 78 S.Ct. 99, 102, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (1957). Basically, Wright alleged a conspiracy on the part of the defendants to withhold from the public and the press information that a number of rapes had occurred in Ozark during 1980 and 1981, including one that occurred a month before she was raped. The purpose of the conspiracy was to "protect the good name of the City of Ozark" in order not to damage the city's commercial potential. She alleged further that had the defendants not suppressed the information, she, as a reader of the local newspapers, would have become aware that a rapist or rapists were running loose in the city of Ozark. Had she known this, she asserted, she would not have visited a friend who lived in a dimly-lit trailer park bordering on a high-crime neighborhood on the evening of December 29.

Wright characterized the defendants' actions in repressing this information as arising from official policy, as systematic and deliberate, and as constituting such a high degree of gross negligence and reckless indifference to her rights as to amount to willful and intentional misconduct. Wright admitted, however, that the defendants did not intentionally single her out to be denied protection from a rapist. Indeed, there was no allegation that any of the defendants even knew Wright before the rape occurred. Rather, Wright alleged that she was the unfortunate victim of the defendants' reckless conduct.

Our analysis of the relevant case law convinces us that Wright's due process claim must fail because she cannot prove under any set of facts alleged that defendants violated any constitutional duty owed to her. Regardless whether the cases speak in terms of lack of duty or lack of causation, the result is the same: generally, the due process clause of the Constitution does not protect a member of the public at large from the criminal acts of a third person, even if the state was remiss in allowing the third person to be in a position in which he might cause harm to a member of the public, at least in the absence of a special relationship between the victim and the criminal or between the victim and the state.

In the Supreme Court case most closely analogous to the one at bar, the Court held that a murder committed by a parolee five months after his release could not subject the parole board to liability under section 1983 to the survivors of the decedent even if the board acted recklessly in releasing the parolee. Martinez v. California, 444 U.S. 277, 100 S.Ct. 553, 62 L.Ed.2d 481 (1980). In holding that the parole board was not responsible for the "deprivation" of life within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment, the Court first observed that the parolee, whose act occurred five months after his release, was in no sense an agent of the parole board. Id. at 285, 100 S.Ct. at 559. Second, the Court noted that "the parole board was not aware that appellants' decedent, as distinguished from the public at large, faced any special danger." Id. The Court concluded that "the appellants' decedent's death is too remote a consequence of the parole officers' action to hold them responsible under the federal civil rights law." Id.

In a recent case interpreting Martinez, the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the district court's dismissal of a claim brought under section 1983 by the victim of a rape against the state parole board. Humann v. Wilson, 696 F.2d 783 (10th Cir.1983). Notably, the court could have distinguished Martinez because Martinez involved a crime committed five months after the parolee's release, whereas Humann involved a crime committed within one to two months of release. The court did not believe this was a basis for distinguishing the two cases, however. Instead, it pointed out that the observations the Court made in Martinez --which the Humann court labeled "conditions"--were equally true in the case before it. The parolee could not be deemed an agent of the state in choosing to commit a crime. Furthermore, the plaintiffs' decedent stood in no special relationship to the parolee that would have alerted the parole officers to a special danger to the decedent. Thus, the court found Martinez controlling.

In Bowers v. DeVito, 686 F.2d 616 (7th Cir.1982), the administrator of a decedent's estate brought a section 1983 action against officers and physicians of a mental health facility. The defendants had released from the facility a person who a year later murdered the decedent. The administrator alleged that the defendants knew that the murderer was dangerous when they released him, and thus acted recklessly in doing so. The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendants. Although the court recognized Martinez, it did not base its holding thereon. Instead, it...