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COUNTY OF SACRAMENTO v. PHILLIP LEWIS
523 U.S. 833, 118 S. Ct. 1708, 140 L. Ed. 2d 1043 (1998)
Issued May 26, 1998
Lavery Law reviews this sixteen year old United States Supreme Court decision which provides the
basis for evaluating Section 1983 liability in high speed pursuit cases.
By: Robert G. Hanna, Jr., Esquire
Jessica S. Hosenpud, Esquire
Lavery Law
225 Market Street, Suite 304
P. O. Box 1245
Harrisburg, PA 17108-1245
(717) 233-6633
rhanna@laverylaw.com
jhosenpud@laverylaw.com
Posted May 2015
In this sixteen year old decision, the United States Supreme Court considered the
applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause to a police pursuit. Six justices
joined in the majority opinion and the remaining three concurred in the judgment.
The majority framed the issue presented by the appeal as “whether a police officer violates
the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of Substantive Due Process by causing death through
deliberate or reckless indifference to life in a high-speed automobile chase aimed at apprehending a
suspected offender.” After considering applicable precedent, the Court held “in such circumstances
only a purpose to cause harm unrelated to the legitimate object of arrest will satisfy the elements of
arbitrary conduct shocking to the conscious,” necessary for a substantive due process violation.
In several of our recent cases, an effort has been made by Plaintiffs to use the Fourteenth
Amendment to turn what we consider to be an automobile accident into a constitutional claim.
Understanding this decision and why the Court crafted the standard for a substantive due process
claim as it did becomes important and newsworthy.
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The factual background of this case dates back to May 22, 1990, at approximately 8:30 p.m.,
when James Everett Smith [hereinafter “Smith”], Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy, along with
another officer, Murray Stapp [hereinafter “Stapp”], responded to a call to break up a fight. Upon
returning to his patrol car, Stapp saw a motorcycle approaching at high speed. It was operated by
eighteen-year-old, Brian Willard [hereinafter “Willard”] and carried Phillip Lewis [hereinafter
“Lewis”] as a passenger. Neither boy had anything to do with the fight that prompted the call to the
police.
Stapp turned on his overhead rotating lights, yelled to the boys to stop, and pulled his patrol
car closer to Smith’s attempting to pin the motorcycle in. Instead of pulling over, Willard slowly
maneuvered the cycle between the two police cars and sped off. Smith turned on his emergency
lights and siren and began a pursuit at high speed. For seventy-five seconds over a course of 1.3
miles in a residential neighborhood, the motorcycle wove in and out of upcoming traffic forcing two
cars and a bicycle to swerve off the road. The motorcycle and patrol car actually reached speeds up
to 100 miles per hour, with Smith following at a distance as short as 100 feet; at that speed, his car
would have required 650 feet to stop.
The chase ended after the motorcycle tipped over as Willard tried a sharp left turn. Willard
got out of the way but Lewis did not and was struck by the patrol car propelling him some 70 feet
down the road and inflicting massive fatal injuries. Lewis was pronounced dead at the scene.
Obviously, the Fourth Amendment does not apply to this case. That Amendment covers
only “searches and seizures.” Obviously, there was no search, and a seizure requires the termination
of Lewis freedom of movement through means intentionally applied. Brower vs. County of Inyo
489 US 593 (1989). The Brower Court illustrated the point by saying that no Fourth Amendment
seizure would take place where a “pursuing police car sought to stop the suspect only by the show of
authority represented by flashing lights and continuing pursuit,” but accidentally stopped the suspect
by crashing into him. Id. at 597. That is exactly the case before the Court in Lewis. The Lewis
Court illustrated this point by citation to Campbell v. White, 916 F. 2d 421, 423 (7th Cir. 1990),
decided after Brower, which found no seizure where a police officer accidentally struck a fleeing
motorcyclist during a high speed pursuit. Likewise, in California v. Hodari D., 499 U.S. 621, 626
(1991), the Court held that an attempted pursuit does not amount to a seizure within the meaning of
the Fourth Amendment.
In Lewis, the District Court granted summary judgment as to all defendants (Deputy Smith,
Sacramento County, and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department). The Ninth Circuit affirmed
as to the County and the Sheriff’s Department, but reversed as to Deputy Smith, holding “the
appropriate degree of fault to be applied to high-speed police pursuits is deliberate in difference to,
or reckless disregard for, a person’s right to life and personal security.” The key point here is that
the issue of municipality liability was not considered. In Fagan v. Vineland, a 1994 Third Circuit
opinion, the municipal picture becomes somewhat confused. On the one hand, Fagan stands for the
proposition that is possible to have municipality liability without individual liability. On the other,
like decisions from all federal courts, it stands for the proposition that there must be an underlying
constitutional tort.
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Here, in reaching it’s near unanimous decision that the substantive component of the due
process clause was not violated, the Court looked back at it’s decisions over the previous decade
interpreting and limiting the substantive component of due process. The danger the Court faced was
allowing the Fourteenth Amendment to become a mere expansion of traditional state tort law. It
noted, for example, that “the due process rights of a [pre-trial detainee] are at least as great as the
Eight Amendment protection available to a convicted prisoner.”
The Court repeatedly sited to Collins v. City of Harker Heights, Texas, 503 US 115 (1992).
There, Larry Michaels Collins, an employee in the Sanitation Department in the [City of Harker
Heights, Texas,] died of asphyxia after entering a manhole to unstop a sewer line. His widow in her
complaint alleged that the City violated her husband’s Fourteenth Amendment rights by following a
custom and a policy of not training its employees about the dangers of working in sewer lines and
manholes, not providing safety equipment at job sites, and not providing safety warnings. Yet the
Court in Collins held that a city’s customary failure to train or warn its employees about known
hazards in the workplace does not violate the due process clause, and Section 1983 does not provide
a remedy for a municipal employee fatally injured in the course of his employment as a result of the
city’s alleged failure. Likewise, in Paul v. Davis, 424 US 693, 701 (1976), the Court explained that
the Fourteenth Amendment is not a “font of tort law to be super-imposed upon whatever systems
may already be administered by the states.” Specifically, the tort of defamation the Court
considered in the 5 to 4 decision in Paul did not become a Fourteenth Amendment substantive due
process claim. For due process liability, in a pursuit case, the Lewis Court held that high-speed
chases with no intent to harm suspects physically or worsen their legal plight do not give to rise to
liability under the Fourteenth Amendment, redressable by an action under Section 1983. Thus, it is
clearly contrary to the weight of Supreme Court precedent to argue an automobile accident, even if
negligent, and possibly support a Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process claim.
Lavery Law
225 Market Street, Suite 304
P.O. Box 1245
Harrisburg, PA 17108-1245
717-233-6633 (t)
717-233-7003 (f)
www.laverylaw.com
Frank J. Lavery, Jr., Esquire (Email: flavery@laverylaw.com)
Robert G. Hanna, Jr., Esquire (Email: rhanna@laverylaw.com)
Karl R. Hildabrand, Esquire (Email: khildabrand@laverylaw.com)
Jessica S. Hosenpud (Email: jhosenpud@laverylaw.com)
Sunshine J. Thomas, Esquire (Email: sthomas@laverylaw.com)
Joshua M. Autry, Esquire (Email: jautry@laverylaw.com)
Carl S. Sandel, Esquire (Email: csandel@laverylaw.com)
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