Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales
The Court ruled that a woman whose estranged husband murdered their three children after police repeatedly refused to enforce her restraining order had no constitutionally protected property right in having the police enforce that order.
The decision means towns and police departments generally cannot be sued under the federal Constitution for failing to enforce restraining orders, even when a state law appears to require enforcement, leaving victims to seek remedies only if their state creates one.
How it got here: A federal trial court dismissed Gonzales's lawsuit; an en banc Tenth Circuit reversed, finding a valid property-interest claim; the town asked the Supreme Court to review that ruling.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Jessica Gonzales had a restraining order against her estranged husband. When he took their three young daughters without permission, she called Castle Rock, Colorado police repeatedly over several hours, showing them the order and begging them to find and arrest him. Officers told her to wait and did nothing. Her husband later arrived at the police station and opened fire; he had already murdered all three children.
The question before the Court
After police ignored a mother's pleas to enforce her restraining order for hours before her children were murdered, could she sue the town for violating her property rights?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that Jessica Gonzales did not have a property interest, protected by the Constitution's due process guarantee, in having the police enforce her restraining order. To have that kind of protected interest, a person needs more than a hope or expectation; she needs a real legal entitlement, and the Court found Colorado's restraining-order law left police enough discretion that no such entitlement existed.
Even setting discretion aside, the Court doubted that a right to police enforcement could count as "property" at all, since it has no dollar value and arises only incidentally from the government's ordinary law-enforcement function rather than from any specific benefit created for her. Because there was no protected interest, the town could not be sued for failing to enforce the order, whatever the human cost of that failure.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Domestic violence victims across the country cannot rely on the federal Constitution to hold police financially accountable when officers fail to enforce protective orders. States remain free to create their own legal remedies for such failures, but without a state law providing one, victims like Jessica Gonzales have no federal recourse for police inaction, however tragic the consequences.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision reversing the Tenth Circuit, so the case is over: Gonzales's federal due process claim against the town fails and is not sent back for further proceedings on that theory. The ruling leaves the door open for states to create their own laws letting victims sue police departments for failing to enforce protective orders, but it forecloses using the federal Constitution to do so absent such a state-created entitlement.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Colorado or any other state could pass a law giving people a personal right to sue police for failing to enforce a restraining order — it only held the federal Constitution does not require that result here. It also did not decide whether the town's procedures, if a property interest had existed, would have satisfied due process.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Souter
Justice Souter agreed no property interest existed but focused on a different flaw in Gonzales's argument: she was really asserting a right to a certain state-mandated process (careful, prompt police consideration of her enforcement request), not a distinct substantive benefit. He argued the Due Process Clause protects substantive property rights, not procedures for their own sake, so her claim failed even if the statute left police no discretion at all.
Dissent — Justice Stevens
Justice Stevens argued Colorado's domestic-violence restraining order statute was part of a nationwide wave of laws specifically designed to eliminate police discretion, unlike older 'mandatory' arrest statutes, and that it created a real entitlement for protected persons like Gonzales. He also argued the Court should have deferred to the Tenth Circuit's reading of Colorado law or certified the question to the Colorado Supreme Court rather than deciding state law itself, and that the entitlement could count as property, comparable to hiring a private security firm.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the rule that a person has a constitutionally protected property interest in a government benefit only if state law gives them a genuine legal entitlement to it, not merely a hope, expectation, or discretionary courtesy the government could withhold.
- The Court declined to automatically defer to the Tenth Circuit's reading of Colorado law, explaining that deference to a federal appeals court's interpretation of state law is appropriate mainly when that court has drawn on real expertise in that state's law, which the Court found lacking here.
- Turning to the Colorado restraining-order statute directly, the Court noted a long American tradition of police retaining discretion even under statutes using seemingly mandatory words like 'shall,' and concluded the statute's command to 'use every reasonable means' or 'arrest... or seek a warrant' still left officers room to judge how and whether to act, especially when the husband's location was unknown.
- Even assuming the statute did make enforcement mandatory, the Court reasoned that a mandatory duty imposed on police does not automatically create a personal entitlement for the person the order protects; the statute would need to show, in its own text, that it meant to hand her a personal right to enforcement, and Colorado's law instead gave her only narrower, specific powers (like initiating contempt proceedings) without ever mentioning a right to demand an arrest.
- Finally, the Court reasoned that even a genuine entitlement to police enforcement would be unlikely to count as 'property,' because it would have no dollar value and would arise only as a side effect of the government's ordinary criminal-law function of arresting people, rather than from a distinct government benefit created for her, distinguishing it from cases involving benefits like welfare payments or utility services.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Servs. (489 U. S. 189)
The Court relied on DeShaney's holding that due process does not require government to protect people from private violence.
Reaffirms O'Bannon v. Town Court Nursing Center (447 U. S. 773)
The Court applied O'Bannon's distinction between direct and indirect government benefits to reject the property claim.