Federal courts unreceptive to claims of wrong raids

Early on a Wednesday morning in October 2017, FBI agents terrorized three innocent people, including a 7-year-old boy, by breaking into their home in Atlanta. The agents tossed a flash-bang grenade, rousted the two adults from the closet where they were hiding, manhandled and handcuffed one of them, and threatened them with guns before discovering that the SWAT team had raided the wrong house.

Last week, the Supreme Court revived a lawsuit provoked by that home invasion, which does not necessarily mean its victims will ultimately prevail. Although this sort of mistake is disturbingly common, holding law enforcement officers or their employers accountable for such inexcusable carelessness is more difficult than you might expect.

As Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion, the FBI agents "meant to execute search and arrest warrants at a suspected gang hideout on Landau Lane. Instead, they stormed a quiet family home on Denville Trace, occupied by Hilliard Toi Cliatt, his partner Curtrina Martin, and her 7-year-old son."

The SWAT team's leader, Lawrence Guerra, claimed he had been misdirected by "a personal GPS device." But that story was impossible to verify because Guerra "stopped using his personal GPS for warrant executions" after the bungled Atlanta raid and "eventually threw it away," as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit explained last year.

Adding to the puzzle, Guerra had previously "visited the correct house to document its features and identify a staging area for the SWAT team," Gorsuch noted. Yet on the day of the raid, the agents apparently overlooked "the street sign for 'Denville Trace'" and "the house number, which was visible on the mailbox at the end of the driveway." They did notice that a different car was parked in the driveway, but that fact did not faze them.

During oral arguments in May, Gorsuch was appropriately skeptical when the government's lawyer argued that safety considerations precluded the agents from checking the address. But the court ultimately did not decide whether that failure justified compensation, instead ruling that the 11th Circuit, in dismissing Martin's lawsuit, had misapplied the Federal Tort Claims Act.

The Institute for Justice, which represents Martin, wanted the court to go further. In 1974, it noted, Congress amended the act in response to strikingly similar wrong-door raids, which suggests the law was meant to encompass cases like this. Martin understandably worries that the 11th Circuit, on remand, will dismiss her lawsuit again.

The 11th Circuit is not the only federal court that has proven unreceptive to the argument that police should make sure they are in the right place before raiding someone's home. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit dismissed a lawsuit stemming from a 2019 SWAT raid in Waxahachie, Texas, that terrified an innocent couple and wrecked their home after local cops mistook it for a suspected drug stash house a few doors away.

The lead officer's "efforts to identify the correct residence, though deficient, did not violate clearly established law," the 5th Circuit ruled. Last month, a federal judge in New Mexico reached a similar conclusion in a case that shows such mistakes can be lethal.

Late on a Wednesday night in April 2023, three police officers repeatedly knocked on the door of Robert Dotson's house at 5305 Valley View Avenue in Farmington, New Mexico. They were responding to a report of "a possible domestic violence situation," but they were in the wrong place.

The cops were supposed to be at an address on Valley View Avenue, which was on the opposite side of the street. When Dotson, a 52-year-old father of two, came to the door with a gun in his hand, the officers shot and killed him.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Garcia deemed that response reasonable in the circumstances. Yet those circumstances could have been avoided with a modicum of care that armed government agents should not be free to forgo.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

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