[3] Sixteen years later, in Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), the Court reaffirmed, holding that a mother could not sue a local government under §1983 for police failure to investigate or enforce a restraining order even when three children who were reported missing were subsequently killed by their father.

Three days later, "On the recommendation of a 'child protection team,' consisting of a pediatrician, a psychologist, a police detective, the county's lawyer, several DSS caseworkers, and various hospital personnel, the juvenile court dismissed the case and returned the boy to the custody of his father.

Emergency brain surgery revealed a series of hemorrhages caused by traumatic injuries to the head inflicted over a long period of time.

Joshua suffered brain damage so severe that he was expected to spend the rest of his life confined to an institution for the profoundly mentally disabled.

The suit claimed that by failing to intervene and protect him from violence about which it knew or should have known, the agency violated Joshua's right to liberty without the due process guaranteed to him by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Furthermore, it held that the DSS could not be found liable, as a matter of constitutional law, for failure to protect Joshua DeShaney from a private actor.

"[11] Finally, Brennan argued that Wisconsin's child-protection laws created a regime in which private citizens and government bodies other than a Department of Social Services had no power or role to intervene with child abuse other than notifying the DSS.

Victim of repeated attacks by an irresponsible, bullying, cowardly, and intemperate father, and abandoned by respondents who placed him in a dangerous predicament and who knew or learned what was going on, and yet did essentially nothing except, as the Court revealingly observes, ante, at 193, "dutifully recorded these incidents in [their] files."

'"[14] In June 2010, in the lead-up to confirmation hearings for Solicitor General Elena Kagan's appointment to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, Linda Greenhouse in The New York Times wrote: Two decades later, the DeShaney decision remains a subject of contention.

It has prompted a large literature, including at least one book (The DeShaney Case: Child Abuse, Family Rights and the Dilemma of State Intervention, by Lynne Curry) and many law review articles.