F I L E D
United States Court of Appeals
Tenth Circuit
MAR 11 2003
PUBLISH
PATRICK FISHER
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS Clerk
TENTH CIRCUIT
SH.A., as Parent and Next Friend of
J.A., a minor child, and S.A., as Parent
and Next Friend of R.A., a minor
child,
Plaintiffs - Appellees,
v.
TUCUMCARI MUNICIPAL
SCHOOLS; THE BOARD OF
EDUCATION OF THE TUCUMCARI
MUNICIPAL SCHOOLS; FELIX R.
JIMENEZ, Superintendent of the
Board of Education of the Tucumcari
Municipal Schools; EDWARD
No. 02-2108
ENCINIAS; KELLY MCFARLAND;
JOAN DENTON; REX KIRKSEY;
MARCELLO VALVERDE, in their
capacity as members of the Board of
Education of the Tucumcari Municipal
Schools; ALLIE PELAYO,
individually and as Principal of
Granger Elementary School,
Defendants,
and
ERNEST F. DOMINGUEZ,
Defendant - Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the District of New Mexico
(D.C. No. CIV-00-727-JP/DJS)
Kevin M. Brown (Daniel J. Macke, with him on the briefs), of Brown & German,
Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Defendant-Appellant.
M. Clea Gutterson, of Civerolo, Gralow & Hill, Albuquerque, New Mexico, for
Plaintiffs-Appellees.
Before SEYMOUR, EBEL and BRISCOE, Circuit Judges.
SEYMOUR, Circuit Judge.
This is a civil rights action brought on behalf of two male children, J.A.
and R.A., against, inter alia, Ernest F. Dominguez, a teacher at their elementary
school. The district court denied Mr. Dominguez’ motion for summary judgment
based on qualified immunity. We affirm.
I
The facts underlying this litigation are essentially undisputed. The conduct
at issue began in the spring of 1997 and continued through the spring of 1998.
During the 1996-97 school year, plaintiff J.A. was a fifth grader and became a
student in Mr. Dominguez’ language arts class when Mr. Dominguez began
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teaching in the spring of 1997. In 1998 Mr. Dominguez tutored both J.A. and
R.A. in mathematics. During class and tutoring sessions, Mr. Dominguez put his
hand down the inside of the boys’ shirts and rubbed their chests and backs, and
put his hand under their shorts and rubbed their legs from mid-thigh almost up to
the point where their legs joined their bodies. This conduct occurred repeatedly
in J.A.’s class room with other children present and almost every time the boys
were tutored. Mr. Dominguez did not fondle their nipples, or touch their genitals
or buttocks. He did not say anything to the children, or threaten them or warn
them not to tell anyone about what he was doing. J.A. stopped attending the
tutoring sessions as a result of Mr. Dominguez’ conduct and ultimately told his
parents about it. R.A. stopped going to the sessions after his father walked in
while Mr. Dominguez was rubbing his son. R.A. stated that the touching on his
leg and down his shirt “felt bad,” Aplt. App. at 69, and both boys often pushed
Mr. Dominguez’ hand away from their bodies.
This lawsuit was filed against Mr. Dominguez as well as the Tucumcari
Municipal Schools, the Tucumcari Board of Education, the School Board
superintendent, the members of the School Board, and the principal of a
Tucumcari elementary school. The complaint asserts common law and federal
civil rights violations arising out of the alleged sexual molestation of the boys by
Mr. Dominguez. Plaintiffs allege state law claims against Mr. Dominguez for
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battery and infliction of emotional distress, and constitutional claims against him
for deprivation of due process and equal protection.
Mr. Dominguez moved for summary judgment on the ground that he was
entitled to immunity on all claims. He argued that the New Mexico Tort Claims
Act (TCA) does not waive immunity for claims of battery or infliction of
emotional distress in the instant circumstances, and that he was entitled to
qualified immunity on the constitutional claims because the facts alleged do not
rise to the level of a constitutional violation. The district court concluded that at
the time of the alleged molestation, Mr. Dominguez was acting within the scope
of his teaching duties as interpreted under the TCA and that he was therefore
immune from the state claims of battery and infliction of emotional distress.
Accordingly, the court granted Mr. Dominguez’ motion as to those claims. The
court also concluded that Mr. Dominguez was entitled to qualified immunity with
respect to the claim that he violated the children’s constitutional right to
substantive due process. After reviewing the case law, the court determined that
such claims have only been sustained when the facts involved were “remarkably
more egregious than the facts of this case.” Aplt. App. at 152.
The court reached a different result with respect to the allegation that Mr.
Dominguez violated the children’s constitutional right to equal protection. The
court concluded that the standard of conduct required to state an equal protection
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claim is less demanding than the conscience-shocking standard applicable to a
substantive due process claim, and that to state an equal protection claim
plaintiffs’ evidence must tend to show that Mr. Dominguez’ conduct was an abuse
of his authority for the purpose of his own sexual gratification. The court
determined plaintiffs had made such a showing and that Mr. Dominguez was
therefore not entitled to qualified immunity on the equal protection claim. Mr.
Dominguez appeals.
II
We review the denial of qualified immunity on summary judgment de novo,
viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party. See
Baptiste v. J.C. Penney Co., 147 F.3d 1252, 1255 (10th Cir. 1998).
The framework for analyzing claims of qualified immunity on
summary judgment is well settled. Once a defendant pleads qualified
immunity, the plaintiff bears the burden of (1) coming forward with
sufficient facts to show that the defendant’s actions violated a federal
constitutional or statutory right and (2) demonstrating that the right
violated was clearly established at the time of the conduct at issue.
Id.
[T]he better approach to resolving cases in which the defense of
qualified immunity is raised is to determine first whether the plaintiff
has alleged a deprivation of a constitutional right at all. Normally, it
is only then that a court should ask whether the right allegedly
implicated was clearly established at the time of the events in
question.
County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 841 n.5 (1998). See also Lybrook
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v. Members of the Farmington Mun. Sch. Bd. of Educ., 232 F.3d 1334, 1337-38
(10th Cir. 2000). “In order to carry his burden, the plaintiff must do more than
identify in the abstract a clearly established right and allege that the defendant has
violated it. Rather, the plaintiff must articulate the clearly established
constitutional right and the defendant’s conduct which violated the right with
specificity. . . .” Romero v. Fay, 45 F.3d 1472, 1475 (10th Cir. 1995) (citation
omitted).
For a right to be clearly established, “[t]he contours of the
right must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would
understand that what he is doing violates that right.” Plaintiff is not
required to show that the very conduct in question has previously
been held unlawful. She is, however, required to demonstrate the
unlawfulness was “apparent” in light of established law. Generally,
this requires that the plaintiff demonstrate a “substantial
correspondence between the conduct in question and prior law
allegedly establishing that the defendant’s actions were clearly
prohibited.”
Baptiste, 147 F.3d at 1255-56 (citations omitted).
III
In denying Mr. Dominguez’ request for qualified immunity, the district
court held that
“the right of school children to be free from sexual harassment by
their teachers was firmly established in this circuit at the time of the
alleged violations, and that a violation of that right can be redressed
through the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of
the United States Constitution under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.”
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Aplt. App. at 197. The court further concluded that the severity of the conduct in
question rose to the level of a constitutional violation. In reaching this
conclusion, the court relied on Tenth Circuit authority holding that an official’s
abuse of authority for purposes of his own sexual gratification may violate the
Equal Protection Clause, citing Johnson v. Martin, 195 F.3d 1208, 1217-18 (10th
Cir. 1999).
Mr. Dominguez contends the district court erred in concluding that the
contours of an equal protection claim by a student on the basis of sexual
harassment by a teacher were clearly established in 1997 and 1998 when the
conduct at issue took place. Mr. Dominguez concedes, as he must, that the law
holding that sexual harassment is actionable as an equal protection violation has
long been clearly established. See, e.g., Starrett v. Wadley, 876 F.2d 808, 814
(10th Cir. 1989) (sexual harrassment equal protection claim upheld in
employment context). However, he maintains that the court erred in drawing
upon the standard set out in employment cases and applying it to teacher-on-
student sexual harassment. He argues that he is entitled to qualified immunity
because no opinion by the Tenth Circuit had announced the standard applicable to
this particular type of sexual harassment, nor had the weight of authority from
other circuits done so.
Mr. Dominguez’ argument asks this court to require exact correspondence
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between prior cases and the instant facts. Significantly, we rejected a similar
argument made by the defendants in Johnson, the case relied upon by the district
court.
[W]e have recently recognized that the concept of clearly established
law should not be applied too literally. Thus, “[w]e have never said
that there must be a case presenting the exact fact situation at hand in
order to give parties notice of what constitutes actionable conduct.”
Instead, we merely require the parties to make a reasonable
application of existing law to their own circumstances.
Johnson, 195 F.3d at 1216 (citations omitted).
In Johnson, the plaintiffs, nonemployee citizens of a city, brought an equal
protection claim against the city’s building code director and other city officials
alleging that the director used his position to sexually harass them. The
defendants contended they were entitled to qualified immunity because the law
was not clearly established at the relevant time that a public official who used his
position to harass a nonemployee violated the Equal Protection Clause.
We disagreed with the defendants’ assertion that cases involving
harassment in the employment context could not provide the required clearly
established law with respect to a claim by a nonemployee. In so doing, we held
that even though the prior cases
all involve alleged sexual harassment in an employment setting, we
are not convinced that . . . the law was unclear as to whether a public
employee could be held liable for using governmental authority to
sexually harass a nonemployee. There is no indication in those
decisions that a public official’s abuse of governmental authority in
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furtherance of sexual harassment in the employment setting is
fundamentally different than when the abuse of authority occurs
outside the workplace.
Id. at 1217. We pointed out the “obvious proposition that public officials
frequently exercise governmental authority in many ways not involving their
authority over subordinate employees,” and concluded that during the relevant
time period, which began in 1982 in that case, “a public official’s reasonable
application of the prevailing law would lead him to conclude that to abuse any
one of a number of kinds of authority for [the] purpose of one’s own sexual
gratification . . . would violate the Equal Protection Clause.” Id. at 1218. Our
conclusion in Johnson that cases in the employment context provide clearly
established law in the nonemployment context is equally applicable here.
Support for Johnson’s holding can be found in Franklin v. Gwinnett County
Pub. Sch., 503 U.S. 60 (1992), in which a high school student brought a Title IX
action for alleged gender-based discrimination arising from alleged sexual
harassment and abuse by a school sports coach and teacher. In holding that the
implied right of action under Title IX supported a claim for monetary damages,
the Supreme Court pointed out that “when a supervisor sexually harasses a
subordinate because of the subordinate’s sex, that supervisor ‘discriminate[s]’on
the basis of sex.” Id. at 75 (quoting Meritor Sav. Bank, FSB v. Vinson, 477 U.S.
57, 64 (1986)). The Court then stated its belief that “the same rule should apply
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when a teacher sexually harasses and abuses a student.” Id. Thus the Court
clearly indicated in 1992 that the same sexual harrassment standards apply in both
the employment context at issue in Meritor and in the teacher-on-student sexual
harassment at issue in Franklin.
In light of Johnson and Franklin, we conclude that a reasonable teacher
would have known in the spring of 1997 that sexual harassment which gives rise
to a violation of equal protection in the employment context will also do so in the
teacher-on-student context. As Johnson sets out, it was then clearly established
that this standard is met by actions that amount to an abuse of governmental
authority for the purpose of one’s own sexual gratification. See Johnson, 195
F.3d at 1218. Mr. Dominquez does not argue that his conduct fails to meet that
standard; he contends instead that the lack of case law specifically addressing an
equal protection claim arising from sexual harassment in the schoolroom entitles
him to qualified immunity. Given clear authority holding sexual harassment
actionable in the workplace as a denial of equal protection and further holding
that employment cases provide clearly established law outside the workplace
environment, and with respect to teacher-on-student harassment in particular, his
argument is without merit. The district court appropriately denied qualified
immunity to Mr. Dominguez.
We AFFIRM.
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