Estate
of Amos
Facts
*
On the night of October 12, 1996, Amos’s car crossed the center
line and ran head-on into another vehicle.
*
Both cars were severely damaged, and the badly hurt driver in the
other car had to be cut from the car.
*
Amos got out of his car and wandered into the surrounding desert.
*
When the City of Page police officers arrived, witnesses told them
about Amos. The
officers told other drivers who had stopped and begun looking for
Amos to stop their search. The
officers started to search for Amos but stopped when their
flashlights lost power. A
helicopter came but stopped its search due to the presence of
electrical power lines.
*
The police resumed their search for Amos on November 21, 1996 and
December 4, 1996.
*
In September 1999, tourists found Amos’s remains at the bottom of
a canyon.
*
Amos’s farther hired a lawyer who in February 1997 contacted the
Page City Attorney. The
City Attorney said the City of Page is surrounded by the Navajo
Reservation where it was common for Navajos involved in car
accidents to leave the scene, flee to the reservation, and report
their vehicle as stolen. This
was so common, that it was standard practice for Page police not to
conduct thorough searches for absent drivers.
Estate of Amos Analysis
*
The federal due process clause does not impose an affirmative
obligation on a public entity to save a person’s life, liberty, or
property. So the City
of Page did not have to save Amos.
*
There are two exceptions to this general constitutional rule.
The first is where the public agency has created a “special
relationship” with an individual as where it jails the individual.
Then the agency has some responsibility to insure the safety
of the individual. No
such special relationship existed with Amos.
*
The second exception to the general rule is where a public agency
places an individual in a dangerous situation.
‚
For example, in the 2000 Munger case (reported
in these updates), the police ejected Munger (who was drunk) from a
bar into subfreezing temperatures.
Munger wandered away and froze to death.
‚
Or, in the 1997 Perrilla case, the police
responded to a 911 call, found Perrilla seriously injured, but
canceled a prior request for medical care.
‚
The Page police did nothing here to endanger Amos.
While they did call off civilian efforts to search for Amos,
these civilians were only untrained passing drivers who had stopped
to help.
‚
The court distinguished the Amos situation and the police’s
barring of untrained rescuers from the 1990 Ross case
where a deputy had barred trained rescuers from saving a drowning
boy because only fire department divers were authorized to do so
(but they arrived too late).
*
So the Ninth Circuit rejected the estate’s due process claim.
*
The Ninth Circuit was, however, more sympathetic to the estate’s
equal protection claim.
*
The primary issue under the estate’s equal protection claim was
whether someone not in the protected class (Amos was white) could
raise such a claim. Normally
a white plaintiff does not have standing to raise a claim of
discrimination against minorities.
The Ninth Circuit held that the estate in this case did have
standing to raise such a claim because the Page police had treated
Amos as if he were a Navajo.
