I posted back in December about a paper I found online explaining what was legally needed to establish/prove Special Relationship so No Duty to Protect doe not count. I urge you to read it and to understand what is the law which means it is not the same as we wish we wanted the law to be in this case.
To establish a special relationship, a plaintiff has the burden of proving: (1) an assumption by the municipality, through promises or actions, of an affirmative duty to act on behalf of the party who was injured; (2) knowledge on the part of the municipality’s agents that inaction could lead to harm; (3) some form of direct contact between the municipality’s agents and the injured party; and (4) the injured party’s justifiable reliance on the municipality’s affirmative undertaking. All four elements must be proven, and if not, the claim will fail.
I admit to confusion on the issue. I understand the “no duty to protect” to the person “expecting” protection, but this seems to me to be a civil matter, not a criminal matter. The charges levied here are criminal charges. Are they held to different standards? Does the SCOTUS ruling on duty to protect even extend to criminal charges? This is one of the (many) times when I’m glad IANAL.
The civil trial was dismissed last year.
Ugh. My stupidly slow network access ate my last comment. Let’s try again.
So I didn’t expect much given the no-duty-to-protect that we all know so well, but one of the lawyers at Volokh Conspiracy noted this angle:
“[UPDATE: Some readers brought up the cases holding that the police can’t be sued by people whom they failed to protect for failing to protect them; that is indeed well-settled, but that simply reflects that the police don’t have such a privately enforceable obligation to the public. This case raises a different question: whether the government, as the representative of the public, can prosecute police officers for failing to perform their duties to the public.
In a sense, this is similar to the issue raised in the title of the post (though I realize that the analogy between police officers and soldiers is necessarily highly imperfect): Though surely cowardly soldiers can’t be sued by fellow soldiers or members of the public, the military can prosecute for this. The question is whether a criminal law obligation would apply to the police officers, not whether the police officers can be sued by particular individuals for breaching any such obligation.]” https://reason.com/2019/06/04/deputy-scot-peterson-of-marjory-stoneman-douglas-hs-fame-being-prosecuted-for-essentially-cowardice-in-battle/