Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert
CHICAGO — A federal appeals panel opened a new pathway for the Cook County Public Guardian’s Office to pursue litigation accusing Illinois DCFS officials of allegedly unjustly holding minors at the state's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.
Public Guardian Charles Golbert initially sued Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and the agency's then-Director Marc Smith in 2023 on behalf of nine minors whom Golbert said were held at the Chicago facility after a judge released them — in one case for nearly a year — because DCFS didn’t have sufficient foster placement options.
The complaint named 12 individual defendants while pursuing Americans with Disabilities Act and Rehabilitation Act claims against the agency. U.S. District Judge Martha Pacold dismissed 14th Amendment due process claims against the individual defendants, finding the 11th Amendment protected those people from being sued in their official capacities as state employees since Golbert’s allegations fundamentally implicated the state itself.
Pacold later denied Golbert’s request to reconsider her ruling, prompting a challenge before the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Ilana Rovner wrote the panel’s opinion, filed Sept. 8; Judges Amy St. Eve and Doris Pryor concurred.
“There can be no doubt that detaining a child without court authorization violates the child’s rights,” Rovner wrote, so the relevant legal question on appeal is “whether the plaintiffs here have sued the defendants in their official or personal capacities” for actions they took under color of state law.
“An official-capacity suit typically seeks prospective injunctive relief and substitutes successors when officials leave office,” Rovner explained. “A personal-capacity suit seeks money damages from officials’ personal assets.”
What Judge Pacold did, the panel explained, was take her own initiative to apply a test from the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals “to determine whether, under the statutory schemes of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a claim is brought against a state or an individual.”
Rovner said Pacold cited a 2021 Fourth Circuit opinion, Cunningham v. Lester, but noted several Fourth Circuit opinions instead refer to a 2014 case, Martin v. Wood, and also pointed out “the Fourth Circuit has held repeatedly that the Martin test is inapplicable to federal constitutional claims brought” under the same law Golbert invoked.
“The Supreme Court and the Fourth Circuit have confirmed that the Eleventh Amendment and state sovereign immunity doctrine pose no obstacle to suits seeking money damages for federal constitutional torts from state officials sued individually for their personal assets” under the applicable federal law, Rovner wrote, reinforcing the purpose of deterring government employees from using their jobs to inhibit constitutional protections.
The panel said Pacold’s use of the Martin test was a legal error because doing so essentially provides absolute immunity to state officials from personal liability for professional work. In instances where the complaint doesn’t specify if such people are being sued in their personal capacities, courts are empowered to discern whether the litigation implicates the government or an individual.
Despite the typical assumption complaints like Golbert’s sound in official capacity, the panel said, “a complaint seeking only compensatory and punitive damages suggests an intent to sue the officers in their personal capacities.” Golbert’s requested penalty didn’t include any injunctions, and a stated desire to use the lawsuit as means of deterring future violations doesn’t make the complaint an official capacity action.
“Imagine a lawsuit in which a person injured by her neighbor’s cracked sidewalk seeks compensation in the form of money damages,” Rovner wrote. “She might also wish that a large sum of compensatory and punitive damages will cause enough financial pain to the neighbors that it encourages them to repair the sidewalk so that no one else is harmed. But that desire does not turn the suit for money damages into one for injunctive relief.”
The panel said one “definitive sign” in deciding what type of action Golbert is pursuing is that the defendants could end the claim by offering to settle for the money requested while still refusing to alter any DCFS policies. Another important indicator is that the list of defendants includes people who left their DCFS employment before the initial complaint and that Golbert hasn’t tried to substitute the people currently occupying those positions.
“The complaint alleges that the individual defendants received ongoing warnings about the problem of children being incarcerated in the JTDC after receiving orders for their release and received notice during their tenure of every wrongfully incarcerated child in DCFS custody or care,” Rovner wrote. “The plaintiffs further alleged that these defendants had decision-making authority and responsibility to provide appropriate placements for children in DCFS care, yet knowingly and personally failed to exercise that authority and fulfill those duties.”
Finally, Golbert argued that the individual defendants’ choice to assert qualified immunity as a defense — which is not available in official capacity litigation — signifies they also interpreted the allegations as implicating their personal capacities. But the panel said the defendants clarified qualified immunity was an alternative defense “and arguments made in the alternative are not concessions to the opposing party’s framing of the issues.”
Because Judge Pacold erred, and further because she didn’t address whether the complaint adequately stated a claim or consider qualified immunity, the panel said the proper recourse was remanding the complaint for those determinations, “particularly because there may be fact questions regarding the extent to which the defendants were personally involved in placement decisions.”
Golbert is represented in the action by attorneys from the firm of Loevy & Loevy, of Chicago.
