By: Max Giuliano*
Abstract
Domestic violence is a societal ill that has plagued the United States for decades. By definition, domestic violence is inflicted by “private actors,” or those not acting in an official or governmental capacity. In the 1989 case of DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the Supreme Court held that government officials have no constitutional obligation to protect citizens from violence or injury inflicted by private actors. Significantly, however, the opinion’s dicta provided two exceptions.
One of those exceptions became known as the “state-created danger doctrine.” Under this doctrine, individuals can hold state actors legally accountable for creating dangerous conditions that allowed a private party to harm them. Since DeShaney, eleven circuit courts of appeals have adopted the state-created danger doctrine. Notably, eight of those circuits have applied the doctrine to domestic violence cases. In these circuits, the state-created danger doctrine provides domestic violence victims judicial recourse when state action either caused or exacerbated their risk of injury.
But the state-created danger doctrine is not universally followed. Today, the Fifth Circuit stands alone as the only circuit to refuse consistently to adopt the state-created danger doctrine. The Fifth Circuit’s obstinacy deprives domestic violence victims within the jurisdiction’s ambit judicial recourse that those in virtually every other circuit enjoy. Indeed, the devastating effects of the Fifth Circuit’s refusal to recognize the state-created danger doctrine became clear in 2020 when the court decided Robinson v. Webster County.
The Robinson case not only highlights the unjust results of denying Fifth Circuit domestic violence victims access to the doctrine but also represents a crucial missed opportunity for the Fifth Circuit to finally join its sister circuits in recognizing the doctrine’s validity.
*J.D. Candidate, The Pennsylvania State University, Penn State Law, 2023.