Sharon LEE, Individually and as Administratrix of the Estate of Courtney Fisher, Deceased, Appellant, v. PINE BLUFF SCHOOL DISTRICT; Darrell McField, Individually and as agent and employee of the Pine Bluff School District, Appellees.
No. 05-2011.
United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit.
Filed: Jan. 8, 2007.
Submitted: Sept. 27, 2006.
Before WOLLMAN, MURPHY, and COLLOTON, Circuit Judges.
COLLOTON, Circuit Judge.
Sharon Lee appeals the decision of the district court dismissing her lawsuit against the Pine Bluff School District and Darrell McField, an employee of the school district. We affirm.
I.
This case involves the tragic death of Courtney Fisher, Lee‘s son and a former student in the Pine Bluff School District. According to Lee‘s complaint, in January 2004, Courtney was an eighth-grade student at Jack Robey Junior High School in Pine Bluff, and a member of the school band. McField was the director of the band, and he supervised band activities and trips.
The complaint alleges that the band and its members were invited to participate in a competition in Atlanta, Georgia, on or about January 16-20, 2004, and Lee permitted Courtney to make the trip to Atlanta. Lee completed a “medical form,” which listed Courtney‘s grandmother as an “emergency contact person,” and which also provided a name and telephone number for the family doctor, and a health insurance policy number. Lee checked a box stating that Courtney had no physical problems that would prohibit exercise, and then signed her name to a statement that “I give my consent to the band director to secure treatment at the best medical facility available if an injury does occur.” The complaint alleged that because parents and teachers were chaperones on the tour, Lee was confident that Courtney would be provided “reasonable care and supervision,” and that Courtney‘s grandmother would be contacted immediately “in the event an emergency occurred and Courtney became ill or injured.”
According to the complaint, Courtney became ill on Saturday, January 17, after arriving in Atlanta. McField held Courtney out of the band competition on that date due to the severity of the symptoms, and “for the duration of the trip, Courtney was confined to a bed in his hotel room, making occasional trips to the bathroom to vomit.” The complaint asserts that Courtney could not eat, and that his only source of sustenance was juice and water. Lee alleges that although the adults recognized that Courtney was extremely ill, and did not allow him to participate in functions or sightseeing excursions, they failed to seek medical attention, and did not notify his family or physician of the illness.
The complaint alleges that when the band returned home in the early morning of January 20, Lee drove Courtney directly to a regional medical center, where medical personnel determined that he should be transported to a children‘s hospital in Little Rock. Courtney suffered cardiac arrest upon his admission to the hospital, and he died on January 21. The death was attributed to undiagnosed diabetes. Lee‘s complaint alleges that Courtney‘s death could have been prevented if the chaperones, including McField, had sought medical care for Courtney.
Lee brought several state-law claims of negligence against McField and the school district, and also included an allegation, read generously, that the Pine Bluff School District and McField are liable under
The district court1 dismissed the constitutional claim with prejudice, holding that “to assume federal jurisdiction over this case would require the Court to disregard the admonition in Dorothy J. [v. Little Rock Sch. Dist., 7 F.3d 729 (8th Cir.1993)], that common law torts should not be converted into constitutional violations merely because the actor was employed by a subdivision of the state.” The court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the remaining state-law claims and dismissed them without prejudice. We review the district court‘s decision de novo, recognizing that a complaint is properly dismissed “if it is clear that no relief can be granted under any set of facts that could be proven consistent with the allegations.” Casino Res. Corp. v. Harrah‘s Entm‘t, Inc., 243 F.3d 435, 437 (8th Cir. 2001).
II.
The Due Process Clause of the
In “certain limited circumstances,” however, when the State restrains an individual‘s liberty “through incarceration, institutionalization, or other similar restraint,” the Constitution does impose a corresponding duty on the State “to assume some responsibility for [the individual‘s] safety and general well-being,” because the State has rendered the person unable to care for himself. Id. at 198-200. The substantive component of the Due Process Clause, for example, requires a State to provide involuntarily committed mental patients with such services as are necessary to ensure their “reasonable safety,” Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307, 324 (1982), and to provide suspects in police custody with medical care required by injuries suffered during their apprehension. Revere v. Massachusetts Gen. Hosp., 463 U.S. 239, 244 (1983).
The district court dismissed Lee‘s constitutional claim against the Pine Bluff School District without delving into these principles, because the complaint alleged no policy or custom of the district that caused an alleged constitutional violation. We agree with this conclusion. It is well settled that a municipality may not be found liable under
Whether McField, the band director, may be liable under
We previously have considered whether compulsory attendance at public schools places a student within the limited category of individuals to whom the State owes a special duty of care. In Dorothy J., we joined three other circuits in holding that “state-mandated school attendance does not entail so restrictive a custodial relationship as to impose upon the State the same duty to protect it owes to prison inmates, or to the involuntarily institutionalized.” 7 F.3d at 732 (internal citation omitted). In Dorothy J., therefore, we held that school officials did not have a constitutional duty to protect a mentally retarded student from violent acts of another student. See also, e.g., Maldonado v. Josey, 975 F.2d 727, 731-33 (10th Cir. 1992) (holding that a public school teacher had no constitutional duty to supervise a fifth grade student who, left unsupervised in cloakroom, became caught on his bandana and died of strangulation). Not long after Dorothy J., the Supreme Court indicated agreement with our holding, saying “we do not, of course, suggest that public schools as a general matter have such a degree of control over children as to give rise to a ‘duty to protect.‘” Vernonia Sch. Dist. v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646, 655 (1995). Cf. Hasenfus v. LaJeunesse, 175 F.3d 68, 72 (1st Cir. 1999) (reserving whether schools may have a “specific” duty of care in certain “narrow circumstances“).
Given that even mandatory school attendance generally does not give rise to a constitutional duty of care that could trigger liability based on substantive due process, it is not surprising that the weight of authority also holds that school officials have no such duty with respect to students participating in voluntary school-related activities that are not required by state law. For if a citizen voluntarily exercises his liberty to enter into the custody of a state official or to participate in a state-sponsored activity, it is difficult to conclude that the State has deprived the citizen of liberty. See Zinermon v. Burch, 494 U.S. 113, 117 n. 3 (1990) (“If only those patients who are competent to consent to admission are allowed to sign themselves in as ‘voluntary’ patients, then they would not be deprived of any liberty interest at all.“); Torisky v. Schweiker, 446 F.3d 438, 446 (3d Cir. 2006) (“[A] custodial relationship created merely by an individual‘s voluntary submission to state custody is not a ‘deprivation of liberty’ sufficient to trigger the [substantive due process] protections of Youngberg.“); cf. Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584, 604 (1979) (holding that parents retain a substantial, if not the dominant, role in the decision to commit a child voluntarily to a state mental hospital, absent a finding of neglect or abuse).
Applying the principles articulated in DeShaney and Dorothy J., we hold that Courtney likewise was not within the limited class of persons to whom the State owes a constitutional duty to provide some degree of medical care. The complaint makes no allegation that the band trip was compulsory and, indeed, acknowledges that Courtney‘s mother voluntarily consented to the student‘s participation. There is no assertion that Courtney was prohibited from leaving the band activity at any time if, for example, his mother or grandmother arranged for him to be picked up in Atlanta. Lee does not allege that McField or any chaperone denied Courtney an opportunity to contact his mother or grandmother by telephone, or that anyone prevented Courtney‘s family from communicating with him at the hotel during the four-day excursion. There is no claim that Courtney‘s voluntary participation evolved into an involuntary commitment during the course of the trip. Cf. Kennedy v. Schafer, 71 F.3d 292, 294-95 (8th Cir. 1995).
We acknowledge Lee‘s allegations that she was confident, based on her completion of the medical form and the presence of adult chaperones, that the school district would provide Courtney with reasonable care and supervision, and that McField was well aware that Courtney became ill during the stay in Atlanta. In a common-law tort action, these factors might well support Lee‘s claim that McField was negligent. DeShaney makes clear, however, that the State‘s constitutional duty to protect or care for an individual “arises not from the State‘s knowledge of the individual‘s predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf.” 489 U.S. at 200 (emphasis added). As with compulsory public school attendance in Dorothy J., we cannot say that voluntary participation in an out-of-town extracurricular activity is analogous to confinement in a prison or mental institution, such that the Constitution imposes on state officials an affirmative duty to care for individuals who are participating in the event.
For the foregoing reasons, the judgment of the district court is affirmed.