Recent Development by Mark R. Laramie
Kevin Loftin, a gang member cum police informant, shot Peter McClendon in the face during an altercation. The gun Loftin used was supplied by James Carney, a detective on the Columbia, Mississippi, police force. McClendon, permanently blinded as a result of the encounter, sued both the City of Columbia and Detective Carney in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. McClendon alleged that Detective Carney, in supplying the gun, acted to deprive McClendon “of his substantive due process and equal protection rights . . . [by] affirmatively creat[ing] a dangerous situation.” Detective Carney and the City of Columbia separately moved for summary judgment, and the motions were granted. The detective argued that “his actions did not create the danger which” caused McClendon's injury and that he was nevertheless “entitled to qualified immunity from the suit because the unlawfulness of his actions was not clearly established” at the time of the incident. The city asserted that McClendon had failed to sufficiently allege key elements of the state-created danger theory.
The district court granted summary judgment for the detective on three alternative grounds: (1) that the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit did not “sanction[]” the so-called “‘state-created danger’ theory”; (2) that Detective Carney had not indeed created a danger to McClendon; and (3) that the detective was qualifiedly immune from the lawsuit. The district court granted summary judgment for the city on similar grounds. McClendon appealed to the Fifth Circuit, and a panel of that court upheld the grant of summary judgment against the city but reversed the grant of summary judgment against Detective Carney.
The panel first held that the state-created danger theory had been implicitly accepted by the Fifth Circuit as a viable constitutional claim. It then noted several issues of material fact with respect to the elements of McClendon's claim against Detective Carney that precluded summary judgment in favor of the detective. Additionally, the panel held that a decision of the Fifth Circuit and, moreover, decisions of other federal circuits had, in the aggregate, “clearly established” that public officers could be held liable for state-created dangers properly proved; qualified immunity was therefore inapt. The panel importantly noted:
Although generally in cases of qualified immunity we look to the law of this circuit and the Supreme Court to determine whether the applicable law was clearly established at the time of the constitutional violation, we are not limited to looking only at these decisions to make this determination. . . . Relying solely on Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court cases, for example, would be excessively formalistic.
Detective Carney sought and was granted en banc review of the panel's decision. The Fifth Circuit reversed the panel decision and held that in making the determination whether the state of the law was “clearly established” at the time of an official's alleged conduct, courts may look to precedent from outside the Fifth Circuit, but this “foreign” precedent must nevertheless be sufficiently congruent with the facts of the case in which the immunity defense is asserted in order to trump a defense of qualified immunity. McClendon v. City of Columbia, 305 F.3d 314, 332-33 (5th Cir. 2002) (per curiam).
About the Author
Mark R. Laramie.
Citation
78 Tul. L. Rev. 1011 (2004)