Federal Courts Shrug at Potentially Lethal Wrong-Door 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, 3741 Landau Lane. Instead, they stormed a quiet family home, 3756 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 apparentl
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