Castle Rock v. Gonzales and the Legal Obligations of Police

Content Warning: While nothing is explicitly graphic, the details of this case include an incredibly harrowing story of domestic violence.

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court ruled that police departments have no affirmative obligation to enforce restraining orders granted by the state. The case in question, Town of Castle Rock, Colorado v. Jessica Gonzales (2005), hinged on granular, semantic analysis of the word “shall” and the definition of “entitlement” for the purposes of the 14th Amendment. However, the ultimate decision had far-reaching implications for citizens seeking protection from their government by creating the precedent that police departments have no affirmative obligation to protect citizens. The specific facts of this case reveal a striking example of governmental neglect. In light of the ongoing national reckoning about the role of police in American society, it is necessary to analyze the legal obligations on police behavior and how legal systems can be improved to make governments more accountable to the people they purport to serve. While changing the Castle Rock standard to require more obligations of police forces certainly will not address the litany of issues within modern policing, analysis of the legal issues in Castle Rock v. Gonzales reveals that this case ought to be overturned.

Facts of the case

In 1999, Jessica Gonzales obtained a restraining order against her violent, estranged husband, Simon Gonzales,[1]as a judge noted that “irreparable injury” and/or “physical or emotional harm would result if the husband were not excluded from the family home.”[2] The Colorado Supreme Court then served Simon Gonzales with a formal notification that he would be arrested if he did not keep a specified distance from Jessica Gonzales and her three daughters, except for court-approved custody visits.[3] Less than a month later, Simon kidnapped the three children from their front yard.[4]Jessica called the police  and asked them to enforce the restraining order, but the police instead instructed Jessica to wait until 10pm to see if her husband would return the children on his own.[5] After getting in contact with Simon directly, Jessica called the police a second time, and gave the officers a description of Simon’s vehicle and his location, and asked the police to go look for the children there. The police again refused to look for the children, instructing Jessica to wait until 10pm.[6] After 10pm, Jessica called the police again, who instructed her to wait until midnight.[7] Jessica called again after midnight and was told an officer would meet her at Simon’s apartment. When no officer arrived, Jessica drove to the police station and filed an incident report.[8] The officer who took the incident report then left the station for dinner and did not pass the case onto another officer.[9] At 3:20am, Simon drove to the police station and began a shootout with the officers, which resulted in Simon’s death. The police then discovered that the three children were in Simon’s car, having been killed earlier that evening.[10] Jessica Gonzales sued the town under 42 U. S. C. §1983, which protects citizens who have their civil rights violated by the government. Gonzales alleged that her 14th Amendment right to due process was violated by the police department’s blanket refusal to enforce her restraining order.[11]

Legal Background

In 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was passed to provide state and local government with federal support in responding to intimate partner violence.[12] That same year, many states, including Colorado, passed similar laws to promote more robust enforcement of domestic violence laws. Colorado’s law created mandatory arrest provisions for multiple domestic violence situations and created a statewide registry of restraining orders.[13] Using this law to prove why she was entitled to the enforcement of her restraining order, Jessica Gonzales argued that her 14th Amendment right to due process was violated by the police department’s refusal to enforce a restraining order. The district court dismissed Gonzales’s case, but the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Gonzales had a legitimate procedural due process claim.[14] Then, in a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice Scalia, the Supreme Court held that Gonzales had no viable property interest in the enforcement of her restraining order, since “Colorado law has not created a personal entitlement to enforcement of restraining orders.”[15]

The Supreme Court’s Analysis

Justice Scalia’s analysis is rooted in the restraining order’s specific instruction to law enforcement officers that they “shall use every reasonable means to enforce a restraining order.”[16] Justice Scalia argues that, given “a well established tradition of police discretion” that “has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes,”[17] the police are not affirmatively obligated to enforce restraining orders. Scalia’s invocation of the apparent history of police discretion is intriguing given his traditional preference for exclusively textualist statutory construction, which would favor focusing solely on the specific language of Colorado’s statute. However, even though the word “shall” conventionally denotes a mandatory obligation, consistent with the Colorado law that required “mandatory enforcement” of restraining orders,[18] the Supreme Court held that police officers were still entitled to discretion to determine whether enforcement was truly necessary.[19] While this argument may make sense in a context in which a police officer must determine whether a restraining order was truly violated, in Jessica Gonzales’ case, when Simon had clearly entered the front yard of the home and seized the children, this discretion does not seem necessary. Not only does Justice Scalia’s reliance on a tradition of police discretion over the mandatory enforcement requirement in Colorado law create an issue of federalism by elevating the Supreme Court’s understanding of history over a state’s law, it also prevents states from passing statutes to change long-standing traditions. In holding that Colorado’s statutorily created police obligations can be ignored because of the history of police discretion, the Court created a system under which states do not have the ability to pass legislation that changes existing norms. This argument was not explicitly addressed in the opinion, but the Court’s supercession of history over Colorado’s statutory text and purpose demonstrates its dismissal of state legislation.

Beyond the argument about affirmative obligations, the Court held that the police had no obligation to arrest Simon Gonzales because his “whereabouts [were] unknown” to the police,[20] even though the police officers were aware of Simon’s alleged location, in addition to having his vehicle description and home address.[21] Scalia goes on to argue that, in certain instances when whereabouts are unknown, police officers are only obligated to seek a warrant, rather than an arrest.[22] Even if one accepts that argument, it does not excuse the Castle Rock police department’s refusal to take any action to pursue Gonzales’s children, whether via warrant, arrest, or even simple investigative action to ascertain the status of the children. While there are practical constraints on a police department’s ability to prevent every crime, the blanket refusal of the Castle Rock police to make any effort to enforce Jessica Gonzales’s restraining order demonstrates a fundamental failure of their obligation to serve and protect her. Justice Scalia uses the ambiguity of police obligation to argue that Jessica Gonzales thus was not entitled to the enforcement of her restraining order,[23] arguing that even if enforcement is truly mandatory under Colorado law, “that would not necessarily mean that respondent has an entitlement to enforcement.”[24]

This entitlement is critical to Jessica Gonzales’ case, because whether her expectation of having her restraining order enforced is an “entitlement” or simply a “benefit” defines whether the restraining order’s enforcement is considered “property” under the 14th Amendment.[25] In Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth (1972), the Supreme Court held that, for an individual to have a valid property interest in a state-provided benefit, they must have “more than an abstract need or desire” for the benefit in question and instead “a legitimate claim of entitlement to it.”[26] The Court held that people protected under restraining orders, such as Jessica Gonzales, do not have a legal entitlement to having their restraining order enforced; they simply have the ability to request that police officers initiate proceedings.[27] This argument is not only inconsistent with the mandatory obligation implied by the Colorado statute; it also means that individuals whose restraining orders are fully ignored by the government have absolutely no recourse. Thus, the Court’s finding that Jessica Gonzales was not “entitled” to the enforcement of her restraining order meant that they held that no violation of her due process rights occurred.[28]

Practical Implications

While this debate over the nature of Colorado’s statutory requirement is certainly intellectually engaging, the practical implications cannot be ignored. If Jessica Gonzales does not have an entitlement to have her legally granted restraining order enforced by law, the restraining order itself holds no water. A legal system that provides mechanisms for people to obtain restraining orders and legally mandates enforcement of those orders, but then does not entitle those supposedly protected by the restraining order to any level of state effort at enforcement, is a system in which those affected by domestic violence truly have no state protections. Justice Scalia attempts to address this argument, writing that “The creation of grounds on which [the individual against whom the restraining order was taken out -- in this case, Simon Gonzales] could be arrested, criminally prosecuted, and held in contempt was hardly ‘valueless’ — even if the prospect of those sanctions ultimately failed to prevent him from committing three murders and a suicide.”[29] By framing the restraining order as valuable because of its categorization of certain actions by Simon as criminal, even in light of the police department’s blanket refusal to act on those categorizations, Justice Scalia ultimately underscores the disconnect between the formalistic reasoning of his opinion and the reality of Jessica Gonzales’s situation. If, as Scalia argues, a restraining order’s value lies in the threat of potential sanctions, but the government has no obligation to make those sanctions a reality, the restraining order’s threat and, thus, its protective ability, are ultimately valueless. Per Justice Scalia’s own admission, the abstract threat of sanctions was not enough to prevent the murders of three innocent children, making it clear that the restraining order’s value lies not in recategorization of criminal offenses, but in the promise of genuine protection, which Jessica Gonzales and her daughters were denied.

In the context of recent public debates on the role of policing in modern American society, the tragedy experienced by Jessica Gonzales is especially relevant. VAWA, which has been reauthorized with bipartisan support multiple times since its passage,[30] creates mechanisms for protecting vulnerable women and children from domestic violence. However, without the collaboration of those charged with enforcing restraining orders, such mechanisms are ultimately toothless. In order to actually enact the protection promised by VAWA, it is imperative that reimagined community safety structures are truly accountable to the people they are supposed to protect. As Americans continue to discuss a future vision of a more equitable state, the Supreme Court or Congress should reevaluate the rule established inCastle Rock v. Gonzales to ensure that governmental entities, whether the police or some other department, have an affirmative obligation to protect the lives and liberties of the most vulnerable.

References

[1] 545 U. S. ____ (2005), 3.

[2] 545 U. S. ____ (2005), J. Stevens, Dissenting, 16.

[3] Ibid, at 2-3.

[4] Ibid, at 3.

[5]Ibid.

[6] Ibid, at 4.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid, at 5.

[12] NNEDV. “Violence Against Women Act.” Accessed November 9, 2020. https://nnedv.org/content/violence-against-women-act/.

[13] Christian Science Monitor. “Colorado Offers Answers On Domestic Violence.” July 19, 1994. https://www.csmonitor.com/1994/0719/19032.html.

[14] 545 U. S. ____ (2005), 5.

[15] 545 U. S. ____ (2005), Syllabus, 2.

[16] 545 U. S. ____ (2005), 9.

[17] Ibid, at 11.

[18] Christian Science Monitor, “Colorado Offers Answers On Domestic Violence.”

[19] 545 U. S. ____ (2005), 12.

[20] Ibid, at 13.

[21] Ibid, at 4.

[22] Ibid, at 14.

[23] Ibid, at 15.

[24] Ibid, Syllabus, 2.

[25] Ibid.

[26] 408 U. S. 564, 577.

[27] 545 U. S. ____ (2005), Syllabus, 2.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid, at 11.

[30] NNEDV, “Violence Against Women Act.”