Jessica Gonzales called the police as soon as she realized that her three daughters were missing on a June evening in 1999.
Naming her estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, as the girls' probable abductor, she told the local Castle Rock, Colo., police that they should immediately arrest him because a court order barred him from seeing the children without her permission.
Jessica Gonzales poses with a portrait of daughters Katheryn, left, Rebecca and Leslie, who were killed by their father. Police had failed to enforce an order barring contact.
(Craig F. Walker -- Denver Post Via AP)
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Despite her repeated pleas, Gonzales says, the police took no action, telling her that there was nothing they could do, or that she should simply wait.
Shortly after 3 o'clock the next morning, Simon Gonzales drove up to the police station and opened fire with a handgun; the police shot back, killing him. Inside his truck, officers discovered the bodies of the three children.
Grieving and furious at what she saw as a fatal brush-off from Castle Rock's police, Jessica Gonzales sued the town in federal court.
Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in her case, which advocates for victims of domestic violence are calling a crucial opportunity to put teeth into the country's domestic violence laws.
"A decision by this court will have implications far beyond the interests of Jessica Gonzales and the City of Castle Rock," the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and National Center for Victims of Crime told the justices in a joint friend-of-the-court brief supporting Gonzales. A defeat for Gonzales, the organizations said, would "represent a step backward in the struggle against family abuse."
The town of Castle Rock and its supporters, which include the National League of Cities, the National Sheriffs' Association and the International Municipal Lawyers Association, do not deny that Jessica Gonzales and her daughters suffered a horrific tragedy, but they say she suffered no violation of her constitutional rights for which Castle Rock is liable.
If Gonzales wins, the town argues in its brief, thousands of 911 calls could be converted into potential federal cases, and "the expansion in both liability and litigation will have devastating consequences both for the public safety and for municipal governments throughout the nation."
Gonzales argues that a Colorado state "mandatory arrest" law, similar to domestic violence statutes in the District and 23 other states, including Maryland, says that police "shall" arrest anyone they have reason to believe is violating a protective order, such as the one she showed the Castle Rock police.
This, Gonzales argues, made prompt police action her entitlement -- her property. And through their inaction, the police deprived her of that property without so much as an explanation.
Gonzales maintains that amounts to a violation of the 14th Amendment, which says, in part, that "no state shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law."
But the town notes that the Supreme Court has frowned on a similar claim in the past.
In 1989, by a vote of 6 to 3, it threw out a lawsuit by a mother who said that child welfare authorities in Winnebago County, Wis., had failed to protect her 4-year-old son, Joshua DeShaney, from being beaten so badly by her ex-husband that the child suffered permanent brain damage.
The county's failure deprived the boy of his 14th Amendment right to liberty without due process of law, the mother argued. But the court ruled that the boy had no such "liberty interest" because the 14th Amendment does not require states to protect individual members of the public against harm caused by private parties.
The 14th Amendment, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the majority, "is phrased as a limitation on the State's power to act, not as a guarantee of certain minimal levels of safety and security; while it forbids the State itself to deprive individuals of life, liberty, and property without due process of law, its language cannot fairly be read to impose an affirmative obligation on the State to ensure that those interests do not come to harm through other means."
"Poor Joshua!" Justice Harry A. Blackmun exclaimed in his dissenting opinion.
Castle Rock argues that there is no practical difference between the bid of Joshua DeShaney's mother to establish her son's constitutionally protected "liberty interest" and Jessica Gonzales's claim that she was stripped of property without due process.
But in 2004, the Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, sitting as a full 11-member court, ruled 6 to 5 that Gonzales's suit could proceed. The DeShaney case was distinguishable, the 10th Circuit said.
Castle Rock appealed to the Supreme Court, where five of the six justices who voted in the majority in the DeShaney case -- Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens -- still sit.
The case is Castle Rock v. Gonzales, No. 04-278. A decision is expected by July.
