No Duty to Protect
In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that police have no constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, including a woman in Colorado who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband, according to The New York Times. The decision, with an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia and dissents from Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, overturned a ruling by a federal appeals court in Colorado. The appeals court had permitted a lawsuit to proceed against Castle Rock for the failure of the police to respond to a woman’s pleas for help after her estranged husband violated a protective order by kidnapping their three young daughters … whom he eventually killed.
