Emergency medical personnel in Southfield, Michigan, pronounced Timesha Beauchamp dead when she was still alive. Beauchamp was placed in a body bag and transported to a funeral home, where an embalmer discovered that she was not dead. Beauchamp was hospitalized and died about six weeks later.

Howard Linden, the administrator of Beauchamp’s estate, sued the City of Southfield (the “City”) and individual
emergency medical personnel for their actions, which he said violated Beauchamp’s constitutional rights. The district court found that Linden failed to plead a constitutional violation and accordingly granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss Beauchamp’s claims. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (“Federal Appellate Court”) held in its Opinion filed on July 26, 2023, “Because the individual defendants-appellees in this case are entitled to qualified
immunity, and because the City is not liable for any constitutional violation, we affirm the district court on alternative grounds.”

Federal Appellate Court Opinion

Generally, there is no constitutional right to adequate medical care for individuals who are not in the custody of the state. However, there is an exception to that general principle where a state actor’s affirmative act either creates or increases a risk that the decedent would be exposed to private acts of violence.

Qualified Immunity

Qualified immunity shields governmental officials from monetary damages as long as their actions did not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. The inquiry as to whether officials’ conduct violated clearly established law must be undertaken in light of the specific context of the case, not as a broad general proposition. Although a case directly on point is not necessary to overcome qualified immunity, existing precedent must have placed the constitutional question beyond debate. Unlike other affirmative defenses, a plaintiff bears the burden to overcome qualified immunity.

After reviewing prior cases, the Federal Appellate Court stated, “None of these cases clearly establish that the First Responders exposed Beauchamp to a private act of violence by creating or increasing the risk that a Funeral Home employee would begin processing her presumed-dead body for funeral proceedings, including putting her into a body bag and transporting her to the Funeral Home. And as discussed above, Willis leaves room for doubt about that proposition. Accordingly, Linden cannot overcome qualified immunity with respect to his state-created danger theory.”

Section 1983 Claim

To state a claim against a municipality pursuant to § 1983, a plaintiff must plausibly allege that her constitutional rights were violated and that the municipality had a policy or custom that caused the violation. The policy or custom can be an illegal official policy or legislative enactment, ratification of illegal actions by an official with final decision making authority, a policy of inadequate training or supervision, or a custom of tolerance or acquiescence of federal rights violations.

The Federal Appellate Court stated: “To establish a policy or custom, Linden relies only on the City’s alleged failure to train its First Responders to take patients to the hospital in emergencies and obtain permission before ceasing resuscitative efforts. A municipality’s failure to train its employees will support a Monell claim only if it represents “deliberate indifference” to the constitutional rights of “persons with whom [they] come into contact” … Failure to train can constitute deliberate indifference if “the municipality has failed to act ‘in response to repeated complaints of constitutional violations by its officers” … Even absent other incidents, however, the municipality can still be liable in a “narrow range of circumstances” where the need for more training was “obvious.””

The Federal Appellate Court held in the case it was deciding, “While the Second Amended Complaint asserts that the City provided the First Responders with inadequate first aid training, it marshals no facts to support this bare conclusion. For
example, the Second Amended Complaint does not contain any factual allegations about the content or extent of training that the First Responders received. The Second Amended Complaint also does not allege other similar incidents that would have put the City on notice of a need for more training. Finally, its factual allegations do not give rise to a plausible inference that the need for training to avoid incidents like what happened to Beauchamp was so “obvious” that any failure to provide such training would have amounted to deliberate indifference” … If anything, the fact that numerous laypersons recognized signs that Beauchamp was still alive suggests that the City could reasonably have expected the First Responders not to pronounce Beauchamp dead without special training on the topic. In the same vein, the obvious signs of life Beauchamp displayed also undermine the inference that the First Responders would have acted differently had they received more or different training from the City.”

The Federal Appellate Court held: “We therefore affirm the district court’s dismissal of Linden’s claims against the City on the alternative ground that Linden failed to plead the elements of Monell liability, again without deciding whether the First Responders’ conduct violated Beauchamp’s constitutional rights.”

Source Linden v. City of Southfield, Michigan, No. 22-1681.

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