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June 27, 2005
Restraining orders: not worth the paper they're printed on?
Of all the Supreme Court opinions that came out today, the one I was most interested in was Castle Rock because we read the 10th Circuit opinion in Civil Rights Litigation this past spring and the facts were so gruesome that it stuck in my mind.
Judging from the opinion the answer to the query in the title to this post is literally "No." The court held, 7-2, that there is no 14th Amendment property interest in a restraining order granted by the government. A property interest must come from an entitlement and since the police can grant or deny a restraining order at their discretion, Gonzalez was not entitled to the enforcement of that restraining order.
The facts of this case are particularly horrific. A man showed up and took his three children from his ex-wife's house in violation of the restraining order. The woman continually called the police to enforce the order and find the man. The police kept putting her off telling her to wait just a little bit longer and then they'd go get the kids. About 10 hours after the kids went missing the father showed up at a police station and opened fire with a gun he had purchased earlier that evening. The police returned fire and killed him and then found the dead bodies of the three children in his truck.
Based on established 14th Amendment case law, the justices arrived at what is probably the right decision but Justice Stevens' dissent points out that while the restraining order could not be enforced, a contract with a private security company to protect the children could be. What is a restraining order if not a promise, like a contract, to do something. The court also chose to ignore its long tradition of deferring to the local courts in matters of interpretation of state law.
The past term gave us several decisions that seemed to dispense the opposite of justice, deferring to the vaunted political process that always seemed like a cop-out to me when we talked about it in Con Law. Hopefully state and municipal governments will take this decision and Kelo among others as a signal to fix their laws and statutes and prevent these things from happening again.
Posted by Half-Cocked at June 27, 2005 10:18 PM
Comments
Ya, as much as it sucks, I agree it was probably the right decision. Most of all is the fact that if liability was found, the likely result would have been that mandatory enforcement statutes like the one in Castle Rock would just have been taken off the books instead of more enforcement actually being done.
Posted by: Mark at June 28, 2005 08:45 PM