DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services

Although Joshua did not die from his father's abuse, on 8 March 1984, Joshua DeShaney was beaten so badly by his father that he fell into a coma. Despite emergency brain surgery--where the doctors found evidence of months of bleeding--when Joshua came out of his coma he was paralyzed and profoundly retarded. Joshua would need to be institutionalized for the rest of his life and could never again function on his own. The final beating occurred only one day after Kemmeter had visited DeShaney's home.

For his crimes, Randy DeShaney was found guilty of child abuse, and sentenced to serve two to four years in prison. He served less than two years before being paroled. Not content with her husband being punished for his crimes, Melody DeShaney, Joshua's mother, sued the Winnebago County Department of Social Services for sitting idly by and writing notes on the case, while not taking any concrete steps to remove her son from danger. DeShaney's lawyers argued that the social workers and the county had violated her son's right to Due Process under the Fourteenth Amendment by its failure to intervene to protect Joshua from his father's violence. According to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, "[n]o state shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The case charged that Joshua's rights to liberty had been violated by the state's passive handling of the abuse they witnessed.

The Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiff and decided that Joshua's Fourteenth Amendment rights had not been violated. As Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote in his majority opinion, "nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens from invasion by private actors." In other words, Joshua's father hurt Joshua, not Kemmeter, the emergency room doctors, or the police officers. Joshua had been deprived of his liberty, but at the hands of his father, and not the Winnebago County Department of Social Services. The Fourteenth Amendment said that people needed to be protected from the state, but not from each other.

Despite the fact that Randy DeShaney had hurt Joshua, and not the state, the plaintiff charged that Joshua had entered into a "special relationship with the state" that required them to take care of him. Once again, the Court rejected this claim. Rehnquist wrote: "While the state may have been aware of the dangers that Joshua faced . . . it played no part in their creation, nor did it do anything to render him more vulnerable to them." The state "does not become the permanent guarantor of an individual's safety by once having offered him shelter."

Three of the justices dissented, saying that the county had an obligation to protect Joshua from his father's abuse once they learned about it, even if the Fourteenth Amendment did not specifically address this issue. As Justice Blackmun wrote: "Poor Joshua! Victim of repeated attacks . . . and abandoned by respondents [the county] who placed him in a dangerous predicament and who knew or learned what was going on yet did essentially nothing . . . "