Supreme Court revives lawsuit over mistaken FBI raid
In a unanimous decision, the justices instead sent the case back to a lower court to take another crack at deciding whether the lawsuit can move forward.
Federal agents smashed through Trina Martin's front door in 2017 while executing a search warrant at the wrong address, believing it was the home of an alleged violent gang member. Martin and her boyfriend at the time were startled out of bed with a flash-bang grenade and guns raised, as her 7-year-old son screamed from another room.
She sued the government in 2019, accusing the agents of assault and battery, false arrest and other violations, under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which waives the government's sovereign immunity and lets people injured by certain actions of federal officers bring some claims for damages against it under state law.
But a federal judge in Atlanta dismissed the suit and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision. The justices now say the lower courts erred.
'Where does all that leave the case before us?' Justice Neil Gorsuch asked in the court's opinion.
'We can say this much: The plaintiffs' intentional-tort claims survive their encounter with subsection (h) thanks to the law enforcement proviso, as the Eleventh Circuit recognized. But it remains for that court on remand to consider whether subsection (a)'s discretionary-function exception bars either the plaintiffs' negligent or intentional-tort claims,' he wrote.
Patrick Jaicomo, Martin's lawyer, argued before the justices that 'innocent victims' of the government's mistakes must have an available legal remedy. The FTCA was amended in 1974 after a pair of wrong-house raids made headlines, which he suggested makes clear that Martin's lawsuit should be allowed to proceed.
Exceptions to the law make it more complicated.
Frederick Liu, who argued for the government, said that an exception to the FTCA preventing plaintiffs from suing the government for damages that arise out of an officer's discretionary acts applies to the case. He also suggested that entering the wrong home was a 'reasonable mistake' and an example of the 'policy trade-offs' officers make when placed in risky situations.
In the court's opinion, Gorsuch acknowledged that lower courts have taken different views on the discretionary-function exception and that 'important questions' must be weighed regarding under which circumstances they apply.
'But those questions lie well beyond the two we granted certiorari to address,' Gorsuch wrote. 'And before addressing them, we would benefit from the Eleventh Circuit's careful reexamination of this case in the first instance.
'It is work enough for the day to answer the questions we took this case to resolve, clear away the two faulty assumptions on which that court has relied in the past and redirect it to the proper inquiry,' he said.
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