The New York Times covers the Supreme Court’s acceptance of a case challenging a police failure to enforce a protective order (Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, No. 04-278).
Linda Greenhouse writes (excerpt):
The case will require the Supreme Court to revisit a doctrine articulated by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist in a well-known case from 1989, in which a county social services department in Wisconsin was found not to have breached a constitutional duty when it returned a young boy to an abusive father and then failed to monitor his safety. That decision, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, established the rule that the government is not ordinarily obliged to protect people from harm at the hands of their fellow private citizens.
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The 14th Amendment also has a procedural component: even if the state has a permissible reason for impinging on the amendment’s substantive protections, it must use due process proper procedures in doing so. In the DeShaney case, Chief Justice Rehnquist said the question of whether the county had used proper procedures in its care for the child had not been properly presented to the court. Consequently, the ruling has been interpreted by some lower courts as not foreclosing a procedural ruling in a future case.
I feel satfiiesd after reading that one.