Rhodes v. City of Wichita

516 F. Supp. 501, 1981 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12558
CourtUnited States District Court for the District of Arkansas
DecidedJune 8, 1981
DocketCiv. No. 77-1488
StatusPublished
Cited by1 cases

This text of 516 F. Supp. 501 (Rhodes v. City of Wichita) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering United States District Court for the District of Arkansas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Rhodes v. City of Wichita, 516 F. Supp. 501, 1981 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12558 (ard 1981).

Opinion

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER

KELLY, District Judge.

This case was brought against the City of Wichita and two of its police officers on behalf of Horace and Stanley Rhodes, two minors who were twelve and eleven years old at the time of the incidents complained of. The events in question began when five policemen were dispatched to investigate a suspected burglary in progress at a house that was owned by plaintiffs’ father. Under plaintiffs’ version of the facts, which the Court assumes to be true for the purpose of the motion before it, the officers, guns drawn, entered the house through the open front door and encountered plaintiffs, who were cleaning the empty house at their father’s direction. One child was found in a front room where he had just turned on a jukebox; the other child emerged from a rear room, carrying a mop. Plaintiffs claim that they were threatened by the defendant officers, beaten by them, arrested for “resisting arrest,” manacled, taken to the Wichita City Building, held for several hours, and finally released to their parents without charges being filed. They explicitly contend that the initial entry into the house was “without legal cause or justification.” Plaintiffs claim to have suffered both physical and emotional actual damages and seek substantial punitive damages as well.

Plaintiffs have abandoned those aspects of their claims grounded in alleged race discrimination and no longer seek to reach the City under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. It thus remains for this Court to determine whether the claims against the individual officers [502]*502are sufficient under Section 1983 and to determine whether a claim for damages may be brought against the City directly under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. As discussed more fully below, the Court finds that each of these claims is good and that it must therefore deny defendants’ motions for summary judgment.

The Section 1983 claims against the officers are most easily dealt with. The Court does not dispute defendants’ contentions that a mere common law tort does not rise to the level of a constitutional violation simply because it is committed by a government employee, a point sufficiently demonstrated by Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S. 693, 96 S.Ct. 1155, 47 L.Ed.2d 405 (1976) and Baker v. McCollan, 443 U.S. 137, 99 S.Ct. 2689, 61 L.Ed.2d 433 (1979). But, by the same token, a constitutional violation does not lose that status merely because it might also be actionable under state tort law. It is a “basic principle” of the Fourth Amendment that warrantless entry into a home is “presumptively unreasonable,” Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 586, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 1380, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980), unless that entry “falls within one of a carefully defined set of exceptions based on the presence of ‘exigent circumstances,’ ” Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 474-75, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 2042 — 43, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971), and the Court does not understand defendants to claim that any exigent circumstances were present here. Inasmuch as the search and seizure alleged here are inherently at odds with Fourth Amendment principles made applicable to state action by the Fourteenth Amendment, see Ker v. California, 374 U.S. 23, 83 S.Ct. 1623, 10 L.Ed.2d 726 (1963), the Court is not faced, as defendants would have it, with an otherwise legitimate arrest executed in an overzealous manner, as in Wells v. Ward, 470 F.2d 1185 (10th Cir. 1972).

Plaintiffs’ claims against the City present a much closer question. They argue that, by analogy to Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388, 91 S.Ct. 1999, 29 L.Ed.2d 619 (1971), they are entitled to bring an action against the City directly under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments; they further contend that the traditional common law doctrine of respondeat superior, under which a master is liable for his servant’s torts, is applicable in such an action. This Court agrees. While it cannot be denied that those Courts of Appeal which have considered the issue have come to the opposite conclusion, see Dean v. Gladney, 621 F.2d 1331 (5th Cir. 1980), cert. denied,-U.S.-, 101 S.Ct. 1521, 67 L.Ed.2d 819 (1981); Cale v. City of Covington, 586 F.2d 311 (4th Cir. 1978); Jones v. City of Memphis, 586 F.2d 622 (6th Cir. 1978), cert. denied 440 U.S. 914, 99 S.Ct. 1230, 59 L.Ed.2d 464 (1979); Molina v. Richardson, 578 F.2d 846 (9th Cir.), cert. denied 439 U.S. 1048, 99 S.Ct. 724, 58 L.Ed.2d 707 (1978); Turpin v. Mailet, 579 F.2d 152 (2nd Cir.) (en banc), vacated and remanded sub nom. City of West Haven v. Turpin, 439 U.S. 974, 99 S.Ct. 554, 58 L.Ed.2d 645 (1978); Nix v. Sweeney, 573 F.2d 998 (8th Cir. 1978); Jamison v. McCurrie, 565 F.2d 483 (7th Cir. 1977); Kostka v. Hogg, 560 F.2d 37 (1st Cir. 1977); but cf. Dellums v. Powell, 566 F.2d 216 (D.C.Cir.1977), cert. denied 438 U.S. 916, 98 S.Ct. 3147, 57 L.Ed.2d 1161 (1978) (District of Columbia held vicariously liable in Bivens action for acts of police chief), this Court believes that a proper reading of Bivens, especially as illuminated in its progeny, Davis v. Passman, 442 U.S. 228, 99 S.Ct. 2264, 60 L.Ed.2d 846 (1979) and Carlson v. Green, 446 U.S. 14, 100 S.Ct. 1468, 64 L.Ed.2d 15 (1980), not only supports but compels the decision reached here.

The Bivens holding was premised on the twin principles that a person whose constitutional rights have been infringed has a personal right to a remedy, and that the “ordinary remedy for an invasion of personal interests in liberty” lies in a suit for damages. See 403 U.S. at 395-97, 91 S.Ct. at 2004-05; id. at 407-09, 91 S.Ct. at 2010-11 (Harlan, J. concurring). Bivens is inappropriately read as a case of judicial legislation within the interstices unjustly and inadvertently left by Congress: it represents, [503]*503rather, “an explicit recognition that the constitutional guarantee embraces a right of action.” Monaghan, The Supreme Court, 1974 Term — Foreward: Constitutional Common Law, 89 Harv.L.Rev. 1, 24 n. 125 (1975). Justice Brennan’s opinion for the Bivens majority labels a Fourth Amendment claim as “both necessary and sufficient to make out the plaintiff’s cause of action,” 403 U.S. at 395, 91 S.Ct. at 2004 (citation omitted), while Justice Harlan, in his concurring opinion, explained that “a court of law vested with jurisdiction over the subject matter of a suit has the power— and therefore the duty — to make principled choices among traditional judicial remedies.” 403 U.S. at 408 n. 8, 91 S.Ct. at 2011 n. 8 (emphasis added).1

It is scarcely a daring argument to contend that these principles extend to the case at bar. Justice Brennan’s opinion for the Bivens majority does, of course, allude to two situations in which the second2

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Related

Rhodes v. City of Wichita
516 F. Supp. 501 (D. Kansas, 1981)

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Bluebook (online)
516 F. Supp. 501, 1981 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12558, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/rhodes-v-city-of-wichita-ard-1981.