The lawsuit was initially dismissed and the Eleventh confirmed the lawsuit was a bust from the get go. IANAL, but it reads the plaintiff’s lawyers filed more on feelings that the actual law. No Duty to Protect is a hard wall to conquer on just wants. I posted a couple of years back an excellent paper titled Police Protection and the “Special Relationship” Exception by Karen M. Richards which explains the few narrow cases in which Duty to protect does not apply and what are the legal conditions.
The students sued Broward County and five public officials on the theory that their response to the school shooting was so incompetent that it violated the students’ substantive rights under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The district court dismissed this claim with prejudice because it was an impermissible shotgun pleading and, in the alternative, because it failed to state a claim and leave to amend it would be futile. On the merits, the district court reasoned that because the students were not in a custodial relationship with the officials and failed to allege conduct by the officials that is “arbitrary” or “shocks the conscience,” the students could not maintain a claim that the officials violated their substantive right to due process of law. The students appeal this decision, but settled caselaw makes clear that official acts of negligence or even incompetence in this setting do not violate the right to due process of law.
Because we agree with the district court that the students failed to state a claim of a constitutional violation and that leave to amend would be futile, we affirm.
And as usual, here is the whole text for you to read.
Not a surprising result, to those who have learned a little about the way the US legal and police systems actually work.
Hopefully an eye-opener for those who haven’t yet.
The question is, of course, what will happen next.
Nothing. Nothing will happen next.
I don’t know which is worse for the parents: that their children are dead or that they have been convinced that they will somehow be made whole if they can sue somebody/company and bring them/it down.
While it’s true No Duty To Protect is a thing, people have to be wondering ‘why am I bothering paying taxes if these morons can just fold if they’re scared?’.
It’s the same problem I have with the riots in various liberal strongholds. At one point does ‘no duty to protect’ become ‘dereliction of duties’?
That would make sense. But I’ll believe it when I see the current administration in Portland OR, Seattle, or Broward County go down in electoral defeat.
Until then the principle “you’re getting what you voted for” continues to apply.