If law enforcement wrongly raids your house, damages your property and assaults innocent occupants, you might think you could sue the government over it. But legal accountability is hard to come by.
Yet, the Supreme Court just unanimously gave hope to a family’s lawsuit in the wake of a predawn FBI SWAT raid in 2017 in suburban Atlanta.
Agents meant to search a suspected gang hideout but instead stormed into the home occupied by Hilliard Toi Cliatt, his partner Curtrina Martin and her 7-year-old son. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion for the court recounted the ordeal:
A six-member SWAT team, led by FBI Special Agent Lawrence Guerra, breached the front door and detonated a flash-bang grenade. … Fearing a home invasion, Mr. Cliatt and Ms. Martin hid in a bedroom closet. … But the SWAT team soon found the couple’s hiding spot, dragged Mr. Cliatt from the closet, ‘threw [him] down on the floor,’ handcuffed him, and began ‘bombarding [him] with questions.’ … Meanwhile, another officer trained his weapon on Ms. Martin, who was lying on the floor half-naked, having fallen inside the closet. … Only then did another officer stumble across some mail with the home’s address on it and realize the team had the wrong house.
The couple sued the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act. But the district court rejected their claims, and the Atlanta-based federal appeals court affirmed the rejection.
Gorsuch’s opinion focused on the unusual nature of the appeals court’s approach to the case. The justices didn’t say the suit would prevail in the end; rather, they sent the case back to the 11th Circuit for further review.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor added a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, urging the lower court to analyze the case in a way that could help the suit prevail. She said the Federal Tort Claims Act’s history confirms congressional intent to subject the government to liability for cases like this one. The Institute for Justice’s Patrick Jaicomo, who argued the case in April, said they “look forward to continuing this fight with the Martins in the Eleventh Circuit and making it easier for everyday people to hold the government accountable for its mistaken and intentional violations of individual rights.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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