The Supreme Court and a Life Barely Lived by Linda Greenhouse
'IT wasn’t surprising that a man named Joshua Braam, who died in November in Muskego, Wis., at the age of 36, didn’t make the engaging “lives they lived” lists that appeared at year’s end. The life he lived was constricted in the extreme. A series of savage beatings by his father, who had obtained custody after a divorce and whose history of abuse had been reported to the local child welfare authorities to no avail, left Joshua comatose and permanently brain damaged at the age of 4. At 12, he was adopted by Richard and Ginger Braam, who cared for him for the rest of his life.
His biological mother, acting on his behalf, sued the Winnebago County, Wis., Department of Social Services for depriving Joshua of the “liberty” protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court’s rejection of that claim, in a 1989 opinion written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, provoked Justice Harry A. Blackmun to exclaim in dissent: “Poor Joshua!”
I’ve offered enough clues here to enable readers familiar with constitutional law to guess the name that Joshua Braam received at birth. As Joshua DeShaney, he was the nominal plaintiff in the case that led to one of the uglier and most consequential decisions of the Rehnquist court, DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services. For readers who don’t know the case, I’ll describe it here both because it continues to define an important part of our constitutional landscape and because, as the seasonal remembrances wind down, Joshua DeShaney Braam’s unsought role in a Supreme Court decision that limited government’s obligation to its citizens shouldn’t go unmarked.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/opinion/the-supreme-court-and-a-life-barely-lived.html?
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