Background
In two thousand and nineteen, law enforcement in Toulon, Illinois, investigated child pornography images stored on a file-sharing service. An auxiliary police officer and IT employee, Jason Musselman, was given access to the images to help identify victims but kept them for his own use. Victims sued Musselman and local law enforcement officials under Section one thousand nine hundred eighty-three, alleging a violation of substantive due process rights when officials provided Musselman with access to the images. The district court dismissed the constitutional claims, finding no recognized right was violated and that qualified immunity applied.
The court’s reasoning
The court applied the standard from Washington versus Glucksberg, requiring that any asserted fundamental liberty interest be deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition. The plaintiffs relied on cases such as York versus Story and Whalen versus Roe, but the court distinguished them as factually and legally inapplicable. The court noted that the claimed right to prevent police from sharing images with an untrained auxiliary officer during an investigation has no historical grounding. The court emphasized that the Due Process Clause does not transform every tort committed by a state actor into a constitutional violation.
Not every wrong is a constitutional one, and plaintiffs continue to press their statutory and common-law tort claims below.
Nos. 25-1917, 25-1918 & 25-1919 at 10
What it means going forward
The ruling confirms that law enforcement handling of evidence in child pornography cases, even if negligent, does not automatically constitute a substantive due process violation absent a specific historical tradition protecting the asserted interest.
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