SUPREME COURT CONFIRMS REQUIREMENTS

FOR SECTION 1983
FAILURE TO TRAIN CASES

The U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in Connick v Thompson on March 29, 2011, reversing the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and rejecting the plaintiff's "single-incident" theory of liability for the prosecutor's office's alleged failure to train its employees to avoid Brady violations.[1]  In Connick, the plaintiff sued the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office under 42 USC §1983 for failing to disclose a crime lab report when he was prosecuted for armed robbery, which the plaintiff alleged established that the District Attorney's Office had failed to train its prosecutors. 

Plaintiffs seeking to impose §1983 liability upon a local municipality under a "failure to train" theory must show that the failure to train amounted to "deliberate indifference" for the rights of individuals with whom the untrained employees would come into contact.  To meet this burden of proof, a plaintiff must prove that the municipality disregarded a known or obvious consequence that the omission would cause a violation of constitutional rights.  While a pattern of similar violations is ordinarily necessary to show deliberate indifference, the plaintiff in Connick argued that the need for training for the prosecutors was so obvious that he need not demonstrate a pattern of similar Brady violations.  In support of this argument, the plaintiff relied upon an extreme hypothetical introduced by the Supreme Court in Canton v Harris.  The Supreme Court hypothesized that a plaintiff may not need to show a pattern of violations if a city armed its police officers and deployed them to capture fleeing felons without any instruction as to the limitation on the use of deadly force.

The Supreme Court flatly rejected the plaintiff's theory, holding that the extreme Canton hypothetical was factually distinguishable because prosecutors are trained in and ethically bound to know the law.  Further, the Supreme Court cautioned that such an expansion of failure to train liability comes perilously close to "de facto respondeat superior liability" for municipalities.  In a concurring opinion, Justice Scalia noted that if a plaintiff is not required to show a pattern of violations, "'failure to train' would become a talismanic incantation producing municipal liability in virtually every instance where a person has had his or her constitutional rights violated by a city employee."