PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh, Allegheny County and several emergency workers can’t be sued in federal court by Curtis Mitchell’s family, which will have to take its remaining claims back to state court, a federal judge ruled yesterday.
Mitchell died in February 2010 while waiting 30 hours at his Hazelwood home for an ambulance during a blizzard, but Chief U.S. District Judge Gary L. Lancaster dismissed his family’s lawsuit against city and county emergency services.
The family’s lawyers filed a federal civil rights suit to avoid a $500,000 cap on damage awards in state court, but needed to prove a government policy failure led to Mitchell’s death.
Federal precedent has ruled the U.S. Constitution doesn’t provide any guarantee of emergency services, Lancaster wrote.
Regardless of whether the government provides those services competently or not, the only mitigating factors are if the victim is a ward of the state or was otherwise actively kept from seeking treatment or protection, the judge added. He ruled that wasn’t the case for Mitchell.
“The factual allegations in this care are not in dispute, even when accepting all of (the) plaintiffs’ allegations as true, there is no plausible claim for a violation of Mr. Mitchell’s right to substantive due process,” Lancaster wrote. “Further amendment will not cure this deficiency.”
Republished with permission from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review