Opinion
CIVIL ACTION NO. 00-11714-RWZ
July 17, 2001
MEMORANDUM OF DECISION
In 1997, plaintiff, Mrs. Inna Rubin ("Mrs. Rubin"), applied for several permits to construct a residential development on her property. When she became disabled, her daughter, plaintiff Ellen Rubin-O'Hearn, pursued the permits as her mother's attorney-in-fact. After several hearings, the defendants, the members of the Town of Norton Planning Board ("Planning Board"), denied Mrs. Rubin a special permit to build in the commercial district. She appealed to the Bristol County Superior Court (the "zoning appeal") which annulled the Planning Board's denial of the permit, finding that it had acted in "extreme bad faith." The Planning Board's appeal from the Superior Court's decision is now pending in state court.
Plaintiff then filed the instant action in which she asserts various constitutional violations against her, but arising from the defendants' denial of her mother's permit. The Complaint contains three counts: Count I asserts a claim under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; Count II alleges retaliation for plaintiff's exercise of her First Amendment rights; and Count III asserts that defendants violated the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act ("MCRA"). Defendants move to dismiss all of plaintiff's claims. For the following reasons, defendants' motion is granted.
Mrs. Rubin has filed a separate action in this court also claiming various constitutional violations.
Count III is mistakenly listed as "Count V" in plaintiff's complaint.
Plaintiff's allegations arise from actions taken by the defendants when plaintiff was pursuing permits on her mother's behalf. She alleges that at least one member of the Planning Board was motivated by unlawful discriminatory animus based on plaintiff's religion when he denied the special permit, and that at least two members denied her mother's permit in retaliation for plaintiff's exercise of her First Amendment rights. She claims only emotional distress as her damages.
Plaintiff's complaint is fundamentally flawed because the action taken by the defendants, the denial of the permit, was directed not at the plaintiff, but at her mother. The law is clear that a person may only sue for the deprivation of her own civil rights, and not the rights of another. See, e.g., Torres v. United States, 24 F. Supp.2d 181, 183 (D.P.R. 1998) ("Family members do not have an independent claim under § 1983 unless the constitutionally defective conduct or omission was directed at the family relationship.") (citing Brown v. Ives, 129 F.3d 209, 211 (1st Cir. 1997)); Shepard v. Egan, 767 F. Supp. 1158, 1166 (D.Mass. 1990). Plaintiff cannot recover for what the defendants did to her mother. She admittedly does not own the land at issue and acted only as her mother's attorney-in-fact when she pursued the permits. To the extent plaintiff is claiming that defendants' actions directly injured her (i.e., emotional distress she suffered based upon defendants' hostile comments about her), such actions do not rise to the level of a constitutional violation under the Equal Protection or First Amendment clause.
While not contained in her complaint, plaintiff alludes to explicit comments by defendants to a Norton resident directed at plaintiff's religion and First Amendment speech. Even if such details were added to an amended complaint, plaintiff's claims would still fail.
Accordingly, defendants' motion to dismiss plaintiff's complaint, in its entirety, is granted. So ordered.