Doe v. Virginia Department of State Police
Opinion of the Court
ORDER
Before the Court is the Plaintiff-Appellant’s petition for rehearing and rehearing en banc. Judges Duncan and Keenan voted to deny the petition for panel rehearing, which Judge King voted to grant.
A member of the Court requested a poll on the petition for rehearing en banc. Judges Motz, King, Gregory, Davis, and Floyd voted to grant rehearing en banc. Chief Judge Traxler and Judges Wilkinson, Niemeyer, Shedd, Duncan, Agee, Keenan, Wynn, Diaz, and Thacker voted to deny rehearing en banc.
The petition for panel rehearing is denied, and, because the poll failed to garner
Dissenting Opinion
dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:
I have previously expressed my disagreement with the views of my good friends in the panel majority, see Doe v. Va. Dep’t of State Police, 713 F.3d 745, 763-74 (4th Cir. 2013) (King, J., dissenting), and it is mostly for the reasons I detailed there that I dissent from the Court’s denial of en banc consideration. Nonetheless, I write again to emphasize that the majority’s decision sets our court of appeals apart from all others with respect to the authority afforded the federal district courts to hear and consider challenges to state statutes and regulations that may contravene the Constitution.
The majority has identified nothing remarkable about the particular procedures of which it insists Ms. Doe partake prior to filing suit. Indeed, it is largely the mundane nature of the remedies prescribed by the Commonwealth that threatens the upheaval of constitutional litigation there and in its sister states of the Fourth Circuit. There is simply no principled basis to distinguish the roadblocks Ms. Doe now faces from any others that might be erected in another case to defeat federal jurisdiction. Each state within our purview seeking to reduce the costs and expenses of federal litigation can now, by simply enacting a statute or promulgating a regulation, require that any cause of action cognizable pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 be first presented to a Board of Claims, interposing such myriad levels of administrative and judicial appeals as may be necessary to frustrate and defeat all but the most tenacious of claimants.
Suppose the General Assembly had passed a different statute — or some agency of the executive had promulgated a regulation — barring access to public school property based on a person’s race or gender. Would the majority have insisted that Ms. Doe first plead her case before the school board prior to seeking intervention from the federal courts? Assuming that such a statute or regulation, as applied to Ms. Doe, were ab initio repugnant to the Constitution, the Commonwealth ought possess no prerogative to compel her, as a federal jurisdictional predicate, to resort to administrative or judicial remedies devised at the whim of its legislative or executive branches.
Section 1983 and Patsy are unquestionably the law of the land, but the opinions authored by the prevailing panel members have made a poor outcome worse by refusing to confront the Supreme Court’s binding precedent. Instead, my colleagues in the majority have inaptly analyzed this dispute as one involving constitutional standing, needlessly unsettling that doctrine as well. Ms. Doe’s is not a difficult case when properly viewed in the context of exhaustion, but, evidently, easy cases can make bad law too.
I would grant rehearing en banc. My good friend and colleague Judge Floyd joins in this dissenting opinion.
Judge Duncan insists that "the limited issue on which the majority actually ruled” was "the substantive due process injury Ms. Doe alleges aris[ing] from her desire to access school property anonymously.” Ante at 213. If the issue of Ms. Doe’s preferred anonymity is indeed the only one that the majority decided, then it needs to go back and finish the case. As I explained in detail in my dissent from the panel opinion, Ms. Doe challenged her reclassification as a sexually violent offender under the substantive due process component of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Doe, 713 F.3d at 763-64 (King, J., dissenting). The majority flatly acknowledged that to be so: "When it comes to her claims regarding her substantive due process, associational, and free exercise rights, she does not allege harm merely from being placed on the Registry, but rather from the consequences her categorization entails for her ability to access school and church property.” See id. at 754 (emphasis added).
In the face of the majority's offhand, unsupported supposition that Ms. Doe’s threshold claim had been abandoned, I demonstrated why it remained very much alive on appeal, see id. at 765-66 (King, J., dissenting). I was convinced that my rationale was irrefutable. Evidently it was too much so, in that the majority made not the slightest attempt to refute it. Somewhat ironically, I now stand accused of ignoring the majority’s discussion of Ms. Doe's anonymity claim. See ante at 213. I am constrained to plead not guilty by reason of irrelevancy, in that the majority had no occasion to decide how Ms. Doe could obtain a variance from the consequences of
Concurring Opinion
concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc:
I respect the fervor of the dissent’s compassion for Ms. Doe. Because, however, of its continued conflation of standing and exhaustion of administrative remedies and misidentification of the basis of the majority opinion, I feel compelled to reiterate the limited issue on which the majority actually ruled and which the dissent largely ignores.
Because the substantive due process injury Ms. Doe alleges arises from her desire to access school property anonymously, a privilege third parties are in a position to grant, her alleged injury is not directly traceable to the challenged law. Furthermore, because she must obtain permission from both the school board and a Virginia court to enter school property, a decision ordering the school board to adopt a policy for her to anonymously petition for entrance would not redress her injury. Indeed, we did find Ms. Doe’s procedural due process challenge to her classification under the Virginia law to be justiciable, but we determined, based squarely on Supreme Court precedent, that she failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted.
In the end, it is not this limited ruling, if correctly read, that is at odds with precedent from this and other Circuits: To the contrary, what would indeed break new ground is the dissent’s proposal that we o’erleap questions of justiciability to allow registered sex offenders to challenge policies regulating their entry into schools without our knowing whether those policies in fact constrain them.
Reference
- Full Case Name
- Jane DOE v. VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF STATE POLICE W. Steven Flaherty, Colonel, in his official capacity as Superintendent of the Virginia Department of State Police Spotsylvania County School Board J. Gilbert Seaux, in his official capacity as the Chairman of the School Board of the Spotsylvania County Schools
- Cited By
- 2 cases
- Status
- Published