The US supreme court has gone barking mad

[glaurung]

In Town of Castle Rock, Colorado vs Gonzales, the US supreme court ruled 7-2 today that local police are not constitutionally required to protect someone from a person they have a restraining order against.

From the summary of the opinion:

Respondent filed this suit under 42 U.S.C.§1983 alleging that petitioner violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause when its police officers, acting pursuant to official policy or custom, failed to respond to her repeated reports over several hours that her estranged husband had taken their three children in violation of her restraining order against him. Ultimately, the husband murdered the children. The District Court granted the town's motion to dismiss, but an en banc majority of the Tenth Circuit reversed, finding that respondent had alleged a cognizable procedural due process claim because a Colorado statute established the state legislature's clear intent to require police to enforce retraining orders, and thus its intent that the order's recipient have an entitlement to its enforcement. The court therefore ruled, among other things, that respondent had a protected property interest in the enforcement of her restraining order.

Held:Respondent did not, for Due Process Clause purposes, have a property interest in police enforcement of the restraining order against her husband.

This despite the fact that the language of Colorado's restraining order law clearly stated that police were required to enforce restraining orders.

In short: the US supreme court has told battered women that they don't have any recourse if their abusers persist in stalking, beating, or killing them and their children. The fact that this was a 7-2 opinion says many sad things about the state of the US legal system.