Last week the Texas Supreme Court declined to review Constantino Meza, Plutarco Meza, Daniela Meza, and Alejandra Meza v. The City of Fort Worth, Texas (No. 22-0296), a Texas Tort Claims Act case arising from a fatal traffic accident in which plaintiffs’ vehicle was struck from behind by a driver fleeing a police traffic stop.
The issue in the case was whether the city, in the absence of receiving formal notice from the claimant within six months of the date of the incident, had “actual notice that death has occurred, that the claimant received some injury, or that the claimant’s property has been damaged,” as required by § 101.101(c), CPRC. If the governmental entity does not have notice of the claim within the statutory time period, governmental immunity is not waived. The purpose of the notice requirement “allows the government to gather information in order to guard against unfounded claims, to settle claims, and, if necessary, to prepare for trial” (citations omitted). Here the city did not receive formal notice of the claim until plaintiffs filed their lawsuit 21 months after the date of the accident and filed a plea to the jurisdiction. Plaintiffs alleged that city (i.e., the police) knew about the incident, investigated it, and responded to it by making changes to the police department’s pursuit policy. The trial court granted the city’s plea to the jurisdiction. The Fort Worth Court of Appeals affirmed.
“For the government to have actual notice under Subsection (c),” the court stated, “it must have the same knowledge of the government’s alleged fault, in the same manner as ultimately alleged by the plaintiff, in producing or contributing to the incident” (citations omitted). Plaintiffs’ alleged that the officer’s pursuit of a burglary suspect, who fled a traffic stop at high speed, drove the wrong way down several roadways in downtown Fort Worth, and ultimately crashed into plaintiffs’ vehicle, violated the department’s policy and caused the accident. They cited to the police chain-of-command’s response to the accident, which was to review it with the officer and determine whether the pursuit complied with department policy. Although the department concluded that the officer had acted within the policy, it later revised the policy to discourage (but not entirely rule out) pursuit based on a traffic violation or a stolen vehicle. Nevertheless, as the court noted, the officer in question and his supervisors stated that the officer believed that the suspect, whose speed reached more than 100 mph on downtown streets, posed a risk to the public and needed to be stopped. Even if the revised policy had been in place at the time of the accident, it did not mandate a different response and probably would not have made any material difference.
What the court of appeals did not find in the record was any evidence of “the City’s awareness that it was the pursuit that caused [the suspect] to drive recklessly toward the [plaintiffs’] Jeep” or any “awareness that the pursuit contributed to the crash, even if the pursuit did violate policy” (which, as noted above, it did not). Whether the city should have known that the pursuit was wrongful, as plaintiffs alleged was the case, “is not the proper inquiry for actual notice.” Furthermore, the fact that the department revised the policy sometime after the accident “[was] not enough to show subjective awareness of fault” because nothing in the record indicated that the department ever thought the pursuit was wrongful in the first place or even caused the accident (the pursuing officer, in fact, never closed to within one-and-a-half blocks of the suspect, and the crash occurred just 72 seconds after the pursuit began). Without evidence that the city had subjective awareness of “information that led it to believe that a pursuit that violated department policy was potentially the cause, or at least a cause, of [the suspect’s] driving or knew that the [plaintiffs] believed that to be the case, such that the City could anticipate the [plaintiffs’] filing suit,” the notice requirement was not met and immunity not waived.
Justice Boyd, joined by Justices Lehrmann and Young, dissented to SCOTX’s denial of review. He opined that “[t]his case provides the Court with the much-needed opportunity to expound on [the subjective awareness] requirement in light of two other governing principles. First: ‘There will, of course be times when subjective awareness must be proved, if at all, by circumstantial evidence.’ (citation omitted). And second, when considering such circumstantial evidence, courts must indulge every reasonable inference and resolve all doubts in the claimant’s favor” (citation omitted). Justice Boyd pointed to the evidence of the department’s remedial actions after the accident as at least raising an issue as to the city’s awareness of that “its conduct ‘may have’ caused the harm alleged.” Consequently, he would have granted review “to provide further guidance on what qualifies as ‘actual notice.’”
As we have seen in so many recent decisions, there is immense pressure being applied on the limits of sovereign immunity in any number of contexts. This clearly has something to do with the growth of the state’s metropolitan areas, where government actors are coming into more frequent—and frequently more lethal—interactions with the citizenry.
