Federal law enforcement officers have high-stakes, high-pressure jobs, and federal judges should not make a habit of second-guessing decisions officers make to keep us safe. But some actions are so negligent and harmful that innocent people injured by law enforcement ought to have the right to seek compensation in federal court. For too long, lower courts have made it next to impossible for innocent injured parties to hold federal law enforcement officers accountable, but the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision last week, took a large step toward rectifying this problem.
Early one morning in the fall of 2017, a six-member SWAT team led by an FBI special agent broke down the door of a house in suburban Atlanta, fired off a flash-bang grenade, dragged the man of the house out of his bedroom closet, handcuffed him, pointed their drawn weapons at his undressed wife, and yelled questions at them both.
When the handcuffed man was asked his address, and he gave one that was not on the warrant, one of the officers checked the couple’s mail and realized the agents had raided the wrong house. The address on the arrest warrant was correct. The special agent in charge had even visited the correct house to scout it out days before. But on the morning of the raid, the special agent in charge claimed his personal GPS device directed him to the wrong house. This could never be confirmed since the agent claims he threw his GPS device away after the raid.
Left with damage to their door from the break-in and to the apartment from the flash-bang grenade, not to mention the trauma of being handcuffed in their own home while armed men shouted at them, the couple sued in federal court. The lower court threw the couple’s case out, finding that the special agent was properly exercising his discretion in determining which house to raid.
“The officers here were weighing public safety considerations, efficiency considerations, operational security, the idea that they didn’t want to delay the start of the execution of the warrants because they wanted to execute all the warrants simultaneously,” the federal government’s lawyer explained in oral arguments. The government argued that checking the house number on the mailbox before breaking down the door might have exposed the officers “to potential lines of fire from the windows” of the house.
What about “checking the street sign, is that — is that, you know, asking too much?” Justice Neil Gorsuch asked. The government responded that that is exactly what the lower courts found. Gorsuch and the other eight justices disagreed.
The Federal Tort Claims Act was amended in 1974 specifically to allow plaintiffs like the ones in this case to get compensation from the government for raids of the wrong house. In 1973, 16 federal agents broke down the door of a home in Collinsville, Illinois, handcuffed the man of the house, threw him on the bed, and ransacked the house, terrifying his pregnant wife. Thirty minutes later, in the same town, a separate group of agents broke down the door of another house and held the residents at gunpoint until local police arrived and told them they had the wrong house.
CALIFORNIA HAS NO RIGHT TO ITS OWN IMMIGRATION POLICY
Before these events, federal law did not allow suits against federal personnel for intentional torts such as assault, battery, and false imprisonment. But after the Collinsville raids, Congress changed that. The 11th Circuit, which includes Atlanta, has since held that unless a source of federal law “specifically prescribes” a course of conduct, and nothing in federal law prescribes the use of a personal GPS device, then an official act is immune from suit.
The Supreme Court rejected that test last week but declined to go further. Other circuits allow liability when an official’s conduct is “marked by individual carelessness or laziness,” but the majority declined to adopt that rule. The 11th Circuit will now have the opportunity to craft a rule that is more in spirit with the 1974 amendments inspired by the Collinsville wrong house raids.