112 Iowa 428 | Iowa | 1900
The petition shows that the defendant is a municipal corporation under the laws of this state; that the officers of said corporation arrested plaintiff .in 1898, without legal cause or excuse, and unlawfully, cruelly, and inhumanly treated him by imprisoning him in a certain dirty, filthy lockup, or calaboose, used by the defendant as a prison. The following are averments of the petition: “That the said calaboose was an unfit place in which to confine any person, being used as a privy, and being in a foul and filthy condition, and the floors thereof being covered with human excrement, etc.; that he was placed in the said calaboose about I o’clock P. ]VL, and confined without any suitable protection ¿gainst the cold, or any food or water,
The legal inference from the averments of the petition is that the acts complained of were done by the officers of the •corporation in an attempt to enforce its police regulations, and the query is presented if a municipal corporation is liable for such acts. Outside of this state the authorities are divided on the question, and while no case, with facts like this, has before been presented to this court, cases involving the rule in question have been before us. In Calwell v. City of Boone, 51 Iowa, 687, such a question was preJ sonted, arising out of the unlawful acts of its officers in the arrest of a person, and his treatment thereafter; and this language is used: “The police regulations of a city are not made and enforced in the interest of the city in its corporate capacity, but in the interest of the public. A city is not liable, therefore, for the acts of its officers in attempting to enforce such regulations.” The opinion quotes from Buttrick v. City of Lowell, 1 Allen, 172, as follows: “Police officers can in no sense be regarded as the agents or servants •of the city. Their duties are of a public nature. Their appointment is devolved on cities and towns by the legislature as a convenient mode of exercising a function of government; but this does not render them liable for their unlaw