Supreme Court revives suit from victims of botched FBI raid
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The couple barricaded themselves in a closet. The agents dragged Cliatt out at gunpoint and handcuffed him. They told Martin to keep her hands up as she pleaded to see her 7-year-old son, who had been asleep in another room.
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As they questioned Cliatt, he gave his address. It was different from the one for the suspected gang hideout the agents had a warrant to enter.
One of the agents, Lawrence Guerra, had earlier identified the correct house, which he said looked similar and was nearby, on a different street. But on the morning of the raid, he said he went to the wrong house because he had been misdirected by his GPS device.
That could not be confirmed, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court, as Guerra threw the device away not long after the raid. Gorsuch added that the agents had overlooked plenty of indications they were in the wrong place — a street sign, a house number, and a different car parked in the driveway.
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The couple sued for false arrest, false imprisonment, assault, battery, and other claims but lost in the lower courts on a variety of grounds. Notably, that government officials' actions are protected from lawsuits when they perform a duty that involves discretion.
The case turned on the Federal Tort Claims Act, which sometimes allows suits against the government for money notwithstanding the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which ordinarily bars such suits unless the government consents. A 1974 amendment to the law made it easier to sue over wrong-house raids after notorious ones in Collinsville, Ill., but the law is subject to a tangled series of 13 exceptions.
'If federal officers raid the wrong house, causing property damage and assaulting innocent occupants, may the homeowners sue the government for damages?' Gorsuch asked in his opinion. 'The answer is not as obvious as it might be.'
The court clarified aspects of the analysis of when such cases are allowed and returned the case to the lower courts for further consideration.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said 'there is reason to think' that the plaintiffs will ultimately prevail, saying that Congress had amended the law in response to the Collinsville raids to allow cases like this one.
Patrick Jaicomo, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, which represented the plaintiffs, welcomed the ruling.
'The Supreme Court was right to let the Martin family's case move forward for the FBI's botched raid of their home,' he said in a statement. 'The court's decision today acknowledged how far the circuit courts have strayed from the purpose of the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is to ensure remedies to the victims of federal harms.'
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