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Hoskinson v. California12/13/1990
Los Angeles Police Department, and McLean. No one replied to the two urgent teletypes sent several weeks prior to the murder; no one tried to control Atwood's illegal activities. It would appear obvious to any reasonable person, and particularly to a specially-qualified "high risk" parole officer such as McLean, that Atwood's pattern of crime would imminently recur. He had been deemed not subject to rehabilitation.
Atwood's parents, and especially parole officer McLean, should have been profoundly alarmed by Atwood's conduct in violation of parole. The only reasonable response to that knowledge would have been to take Atwood into immediate custody and control. Yet the only person who took action was a police officer from Enid, Oklahoma, whose repeated messages to
California authorities were ignored until after the murder had occurred. When the California parole officers discovered that Atwood had been arrested by the FBI in Texas, they retroactively cancelled his parole, which was the first significant act of control exercised by any of the defendants during his four-month spree.
Arizona allows a legal remedy, A.R.S. §§ 12-820.02 and 41-621(I), when the alleged gross negligence of a parole official results in harm to an Arizona resident. California specifically disallows this remedy, Cal. Govt. Code § 845.8.
It is one thing to protect interstate commerce and individuals' due process rights by denying personal jurisdiction over out-of-state tortfeasors absent intentional and meaningful contacts with the forum state, World-Wide Volkswagen Corp., supra. It is quite another to use this rationale to deny legal recourse to those who suffer injury because of gross negligence having clearly foreseeable and grave consequences across a state line. A number of Arizona cities are closer to Los Angeles than the cities of northern California, both in distance and in meaningful contacts.
Arizona's regulatory interest is circumscribed by choice-of-law doctrine as reflected in the Restatement (Second) Conflict of Laws (1988 Revisions). Section 24 states that the underlying principle is "reasonableness." Section 37 deals with the Hoskinson situation, and provides that a state may exercise personal jurisdiction when the defendant "causes effects in the state by an act done elsewhere . . . unless the nature of the effects and of the individual's relationship to the state make the exercise of such jurisdiction unreasonable." Thus § 37 concentrates not only on the defendant, as does the "purposeful availment" doctrine, but also on the effects of the act in the forum state. The comments state that the causing of effects by itself is not a sufficient basis for jurisdiction, but that several factors should be considered: (1) totality of contacts; (2) nature and quality of effects; and, (3) intention and foreseeability. All three factors are significantly present in the instant case.
The first is implicated, the two states being contiguous, sister states within a community of states. Dumping of parole violators, or a lackadaisical attitude of no responsibility to sister states in dealing with or failure to deal with a mobile criminal population, must not be countenanced. The Restatement, § 24, comment a, defines relationship in its broadest sense, not limited to economic contacts but including "all physical and non-physical circumstances which may serve to link a person with a state." Contiguity alone is not a substitute for "purposeful availment," of course, but merely a component of one of the three factors.
As to the second, the "effect" at issue was a serious cr
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