Hart v. County of Dakota

Background

Tory Alexander Hart sued Dakota County, Beth Dehner, and Jennifer Streefland as trustee for the heirs and next of kin of EKAH, who was six years old when his mother killed him. The opinion states that Dakota County had assumed interim custody and legal responsibility for EKAH after a child-protection case, and that county social workers later participated in decisions concerning his placement and visits with his parents. Hart’s original case was a wrongful-death lawsuit.

The court considered three defense motions or requests and one plaintiff request: Hart’s request to modify the scheduling order and amend the complaint; the defendants’ request to modify the scheduling order and amend their answer; and the defendants’ request for a protective order preventing or limiting Hart’s deposition of Jennifer Jackson, an Assistant Dakota County Attorney.

Hart’s motion to amend

The court granted in part and denied in part Hart’s motion to amend the scheduling order. The court found that changes to Minnesota survival law provided good cause to modify the amendment deadline, but separately examined whether each proposed amendment was legally sufficient.

The court denied Hart’s request to add a survival claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Hart proposed alleging that Dehner and Streefland violated EKAH’s Fourteenth Amendment due-process rights. The court applied the state-created-danger theory, which can impose constitutional responsibility when state officials affirmatively place someone in a more dangerous position. It concluded that Hart had not alleged an affirmative act that increased EKAH’s danger. In the court’s view, the state’s removal of EKAH from his mother’s home and later return to that environment was legally treated as if the state had done nothing under the controlling precedent. The court therefore found the proposed § 1983 claim futile and denied permission to add it.

The court granted Hart permission to add a negligence survival claim seeking damages for EKAH’s alleged conscious pain and suffering, embarrassment, and humiliation before his death. The court rejected the defendants’ argument that the claim was barred by claim preclusion, a rule that can prevent relitigation of claims that were or could have been decided in an earlier case. It concluded that the federal case was different from the state child-protection case because personal-injury claims were not at issue in that proceeding.

The court also granted Hart permission to seek punitive damages related to the negligence claim under Minnesota law. It rejected the defendants’ argument that an earlier ruling barred the request. The court concluded that the earlier ruling had denied a particular motion based on lack of diligence and had not decided that every future request for punitive damages was barred. The court further found that Hart had plausibly alleged deliberate indifference to the risk of injury, which is more than negligence or gross negligence under the cited Minnesota standard. The court stated that punitive damages could be pursued under the negligence claim, not under the proposed § 1983 claim.

Defendants’ motion to amend

The defendants sought to amend their answer to expressly assert comparative fault as an affirmative defense. An affirmative defense is a defense that must generally be stated in the answer, such as an argument that another person’s fault should reduce the defendants’ liability.

Although the opinion’s section heading says the court denied this motion, the body of the opinion and the conclusion state that the motion was granted in part. The defendants may amend their answer to assert comparative fault only as to Hart’s new survival claim. The court did not decide whether the defendants’ existing general reference to affirmative defenses was already sufficient to preserve comparative fault. The court also found that the defendants had not shown the required diligence or good cause to add the defense more broadly and that broader amendment would prejudice Hart.

Protective order and deposition

The court denied the defendants’ motion for a protective order. The defendants had sought to prevent Hart from deposing Jackson, citing attorney-client and work-product privilege and arguing that the information could be obtained from other witnesses.

The court allowed Jackson’s deposition to proceed but limited Hart’s questions to Jackson’s impressions of the October permanency-planning-team meeting and to legal advice that the defendants had placed at issue. The court stated that it would preside over the deposition and rule on objections in real time.

Disposition

The court ordered that Hart’s motion to amend the scheduling order was granted in part and denied in part; the defendants’ motion to amend the scheduling order was granted as described above; and the defendants’ motion for a protective order was denied.