Court Limits Relief For Brutality Victims Ruling Holds Municipalities Usually Aren’t Liable For Actions Of Police Officers

The Supreme Court made it tougher Monday for victims of police brutality to sue local governments successfully, holding in a sharply divided ruling that a municipality cannot be held liable for an officer’s actions even if he had a history of assault before being hired.

The decision’s impact goes beyond disputes about excessive police force and would affect cases filed over any violation of a federally protected civil right. By a 5-to-4 vote, the court said a victim must show that a city or county consciously disregarded the risk of hiring a person and that the injuries were a “plainly obvious consequence” of the hiring decision.

The case involves a deputy sheriff in Oklahoma who was hired despite his criminal record and who subsequently, while on duty, pulled a woman from a truck and threw her to the ground. Her knees were injured so severely that, even after four operations, she still needed total knee replacements.

A lower court ruled that she was entitled to an $818,000 judgment against the Bryan County board of commissioners, but the Supreme Court reversed that decision.

Although a victim still could sue the individual officer, Monday’s ruling makes it harder for a person to bring suit under a Reconstruction-era law, known as Section 1983 for its place in the U.S. Code, that allows people to sue a state or municipality for infringing on rights protected by the Constitution or federal statute. However, the ruling covers only hiring decisions, not claims that a government failed, for example, to properly train or discipline officers or other workers.

“(A) finding of culpability cannot depend on the mere probability that any officer inadequately screened will inflict any constitutional injury,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the court. “Rather, it must depend on a finding that this officer was highly likely to inflict the particular injury suffered by the plaintiff.”

The court said Congress intended the civil rights law to be used only when government directly deprives an individual of federal rights. “Cases involving constitutional injuries allegedly traceable to an ill-considered hiring decision pose the greatest risk that a municipality will be held liable for an injury that it did not cause,” O’Connor said. She was joined by the four other justices who have been most concerned about protecting states’ authority and rights: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. Dissenting justices said the ruling unfairly raises the threshold for when states and municipalities will be held responsible for their own hires. They asserted that it now will be virtually impossible for a victim to show that a hiring decision caused his or her injuries.

In his dissent, Justice David H. Souter challenged the majority’s demand that there be a direct link between a county’s hiring and the harm done as a result of it. The case, Commissioners of Bryan County vs. Brown, involved a deputy sheriff named Stacy Burns who had a record of driving infractions and who had pleaded guilty to various misdemeanors, including assault and battery, resisting arrest and public drunkenness. But Burns happened to be the son of the sheriff’s nephew, and the sheriff testified that he paid little notice to Burns’s lengthy rap sheet when he hired him.

The incident that got him in trouble occurred in 1991, when Burns pulled over a couple in their truck. Todd Brown and his wife, Jill, were heading north from Texas toward their Bryan County home and decided to avoid a police checkpoint. Burns and another Bryan County officer saw the truck turn around and chased after it. When the truck stopped, Burns pulled Jill Brown from the cab and hurled her to the ground. Burns pinned her down, handcuffed her and left her there for 30 to 60 minutes, according to the record.

Brown successfully sued the county, saying that it was liable for Burns’s actions because his police record should have prevented his hiring.