Brown v. City Of Oneaonta

221 F.3d 329 (2nd Cir. 2000)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

Oneonta, has about 10,000 full-time residents along with some 7,500 students who attend and reside at the State University of New York College at Oneonta (SUCO). Fewer than three hundred blacks live in the town, and just two percent of the students at SUCO are black. On September 4, 1992, shortly before 2:00 a.m., someone broke into a house just outside Oneonta and attacked a seventy-seven-year-old woman. She could not identify her assailant's face, but that he was wielding a knife; that he was a black man, based on her view of his hand and forearm; and that he was young, because of the speed with which he crossed her room. She also told the police that, as they struggled, the suspect had cut himself on the hand with the knife. A police canine unit tracked the assailant's scent from the scene of the crime toward the SUCO campus but lost the trail after several hundred yards. The police immediately contacted SUCO and requested a list of its black male students. The police attempted to locate and question every black male student at SUCO. This endeavor produced no suspects. Police also conducted a 'sweep' of Oneonta, stopping and questioning non-white persons on the streets and inspecting their hands for cuts. More than two hundred persons were questioned during that period, but no suspect was apprehended. Ps sued Ds. Ps asserted that Ds violated their rights under the Fourth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution by questioning the black SUCO students and by conducting the sweep of Oneonta. The court granted summary judgment for Ds on the Fourth Amendment claims on the ground that the police encounters during the sweep were not seizures. The district court dismissed the equal protection claims, with leave to replead, on the ground that Ps had not properly pleaded the existence of 'a similarly-situated group of non-minority individuals [that] were treated differently by law enforcement officers during the investigation of a crime.' The district court granted Ds' motion to dismiss the § 1985(3) and § 1986 claims insofar as they were based on the Fourth Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause, or state law, but denied the motion to dismiss plaintiffs' claims under § 1981 and Title VI. The district court eventually held that § 1981 claims 'require a showing of specific instances . . . where the plaintiffs were singled out for unlawful oppression in contrast to others similarly situated.' It dismissed those claims. Ps appealed.