Montgomery v. City of Ames, et al., No. 13-2111 (8th Cir. 2014)
Annotate this CasePlaintiff filed suit against the City, several officers, the State of Iowa, the director of the Iowa Department of Corrections (Baldwin), the Curt Forbes Residential Center, and manager of the Residential Center (McPherson), alleging claims under 42 U.S.C. 1983 and several state-law negligence claims. Plaintiff was shot three times by Angenaldo Bailey. The court concluded that a reasonable jury could not conclude that Officer Mueller acted recklessly or in a conscience-shocking manner by declining to arrest Bailey before the investigation proceeded the next day; plaintiff's claim against Officers Owens, Ropp, and Crippen failed because nothing the officers did - or did not do - established either a state-created danger or special relationship that imposed on them an affirmative duty to protect plaintiff from third-party harm; the evidence did not support a finding that Officers Owens, Ropp, or Crippen were deliberately indifferent to plaintiff's injuries; and because plaintiff cannot establish a constitutional violation by any of the individual City Defendants, the district court properly granted summary judgment to the City. Plaintiff's due process claims against the State Defendants rested on distinct factual allegations about whether those parties exposed her to harm by failing to take steps in response to Bailey's repeated violations of a protective order. Even if the factual record had been fully developed on those claims, plaintiff had no opportunity to make legal arguments in support of her position. Therefore, the court affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment for the City Defendants, reversed the grant of summary judgment for the State Defendants, and remanded for further proceedings.
Court Description: Civil case - Civil rights. In action alleging the City and its police officers violated plaintiff's constitutional right to bodily integrity by creating a danger that a man under a restraining order would attack her and by acting with deliberate indifference to that danger both before and after he shot her in her home, plaintiff failed to show that the City and its police officers engaged in conduct that shocks the conscience, and she failed to state a claim for a due process clause violation; the evidence does not support a finding that the officers were deliberately indifferent to plaintiff's injuries; since plaintiff cannot establish a constitutional violation by any of the individual city defendants, the court properly granted summary judgment to the City on plaintiff's Section 1983 claims; the State defendants did not move for summary judgment, and the district court erred in granting a summary judgment which included them.
Some case metadata and case summaries were written with the help of AI, which can produce inaccuracies. You should read the full case before relying on it for legal research purposes.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.