Abuses by state police should not be tried under same framework as municipal cases, research suggests
LAWRENCE — Recent years have seen a wave of individuals seeking justice for police violating constitutional rights. The majority of those cases involve municipal police forces and claims for monetary damages, so what do community members do when they want relief against state police? That is a surprisingly complex question that a University of Kansas law scholar examines in a new study.
Sharon Brett, associate professor of law, has long worked to understand how the American legal system holds government actors accountable for misconduct. In a new study published in the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Law Review, she writes that the long-standing liability standard in cases against municipal police agencies should not be assumed to apply against state police agencies. Currently, there is a lack of clarity in how state police can be held accountable for patterns of misconduct, and the prevailing process from municipal police cases would set the bar unreasonably high, she writes.
Across the nation, there are more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, but only about 100 of them are at the state level. While more abuses and lawsuits therefore happen at the hands of and result in legal action against municipalities, constitutional rights violations still occur when state police interact with the public. Brett said she saw firsthand the complications in litigating cases of abuse by state police when representing clients in such cases.
“The particular question that I set out to answer in this paper developed through litigation against a state police agency. It became clear early on that there was a lack of understanding amongst the litigants, and initially within the court, about the proper liability standard in lawsuits seeking injunctions against the state police,” Brett said. “Why is that important? Because if you want to get a police agency as a whole to change its behavior, and prevent constitutional violations from occurring in the future, you need to get an injunction. Injunctions against individual officers don’t get you very far if the misconduct is widespread. If the problem that you are attempting to correct through the injunction is endemic, you need to get relief against the institution itself — so the standard for obtaining that relief becomes quite important.”
In the article, Brett points out how the 11th Amendment prevents citizens from obtaining monetary relief from state agencies. Although damages from individual officers may be an available remedy, a host of doctrines and immunities may make such relief unavailable. Damages actions also do little to change agencywide misconduct, she added.
Cases brought against municipalities for widespread police misconduct are tried under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983. The statute was part of the Ku Klux Klan act, signed into law in 1871 by President Ulysses S. Grant, and allows citizens to sue government officials who violate their constitutional rights. Section 1983 laid mostly dormant for decades, before Monell v. Department of Social Services of New York, a 1978 case in which the Supreme Court ruled municipalities could — in certain circumstances — be held accountable for the tortious acts of their employees. The Monell decision, and a later decision adopting the standards set out therein to cases seeking injunctions, circumscribe precisely when plaintiffs can get injunctive relief that would correct more widespread misconduct.
The Monell test, however, should not apply to cases against state police for a variety of reasons, Brett writes.
“The paper argues that there are textual and normative reasons not to apply Monell in cases against the state police,” Brett said. “State police agencies typically have broad powers, huge geographic responsibility and little oversight. That often results in abuses going unchecked. So, if we care about the courts being hospitable to civil rights claims, and if we care about the notion that broader patterns of misconduct need some sort of remedy in the law, then we should care about whether we are setting the bar unnecessarily high for plaintiffs seeking relief against state police agencies.”
Brett’s central argument is that another case provides the better framework: Ex Parte Young, which provides a limited carve out from 11th Amendment immunity in suits seeking injunctions against state government actors. Brett said Ex Parte Young and other doctrines constraining the availability of injunctions in lawsuits against the police are sufficient and that the additional restrictions created by Monell are unnecessary and redundant.
The multiple doctrines at play in such cases often layer on top of one another, according to Brett, which results in plaintiffs being unable to get relief. Plaintiffs must meet several different tests to obtain relief, while agencies accused of misconduct need only show that a single test is not met to avoid liability.
“When you see that there's this real incongruence between all that a plaintiff must prove to prevail and the very little that a defendant must prove to prevail, these doctrines truly close the courthouse door to litigants who have meritorious claims that their civil rights have been violated and will be violated again in the future, absent an injunction,” Brett said. “It certainly doesn't seem like an equal playing field.”
In future work, Brett plans to further explore how other aspects of these multifaceted doctrines can create an unduly high bar for government and policing reform through the courts as well as what paths may be available for litigants and advocates attempting to undo those burdens.
“I'm trying to show how these layered doctrines are all sort of independently flawed and when stacked on top of one another create these insurmountable barriers to police accountability in a way that I think undermines public safety and community trust and the efficacy of law enforcement in general,” Brett said.