Black and Blue in “The Land of the Free”: Wrongful Incarceration and the Unrectified Constitutional Injuries to Family Integrity

Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, courts widely recognize a wrongfully incarcerated person’s right to recover against state actors who participated in procuring their wrongful incarceration. By contrast, few courts allow a child of a wrongfully incarcerated parent to recover against those same state actors for depriving the child’s Fourteenth Amendment right to family integrity without due process. In Chambers v. Sanders—a case of first impression—the Sixth Circuit held that absent a showing of a state actor’s specific intent to destroy the child-parent relationship, a state actor cannot be liable to a child for wrongfully incarcerating their parent. This Comment argues that the Sixth Circuit erred in adopting the specific-intent requirement for three reasons. First, the Sixth Circuit overlooked the Supreme Court’s decision in Kingsley v. Hendrickson, where the Court applied an objective standard in determining whether a state actor intended to violate a Fourteenth Amendment right. Second, the specific-intent requirement fails to hold state actors accountable for not exercising every reasonable precaution available to prevent constitutional rights violations. Third, the specific-intent requirement fails to rectify the considerable economic and non-economic damages suffered by children incident to their parent’s wrongful incarceration.