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A family whose home was mistakenly raided in the middle of the night by the FBI eight years ago will be permitted to continue their damages lawsuit after the Supreme Court on Thursday sent their case back to a federal appeals court for additional review.
The outcome represents a partial win for the family, which had been barred by lower courts from suing the government over the incident.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for a unanimous court.
Curtrina Martin, her partner and her then-7-year-old son were startled awake in 2017 when a six-agent SWAT team – believing that they were targeting the home of a gang member – smashed her front door with a battering ram, detonated a flash-bang grenade and rushed into their suburban Atlanta home.
At some point after Martin was dragged from the closet where she was hiding and held at gunpoint, agents realized they had the wrong house.
The federal government is generally immune from lawsuits, but Congress carved out an exception for some situations involving negligent or wrongful acts of government employees. That law was amended in 1974, following a series of other high-profile raids at the wrong house, to expand the ability of Americans to sue federal law enforcement agents.
“The Supreme Court was right to let the Martin family’s case move forward for the FBI’s botched raid of their home,” said Patrick Jaicomo, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which had represented the family in the case. “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 — intentional and negligent alike.”
The Atlanta-based 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals had sided with the government, holding that the Constitution’s supremacy clause barred tort claims against the federal government in circumstances where an official’s actions had “some nexus with furthering a federal policy” and could “reasonably be characterized” as within the range of federal law.
In a technical opinion, Gorsuch wrote that the court intended to “clear away the two faulty assumptions” the appeals court used to decide the case. One of those assumptions had actually worked in the family’s favor. Martin argued that a provision of the law that allows claims against the government for certain harms involving law enforcement should be read broadly enough to capture a wide number of harms.
The court’s opinion limited the reach of that “law enforcement proviso,” which may complicate Martin’s case as it moves forward.
On the other hand – and working in the family’s favor – the court ruled that the supremacy clause could not be used to shield the government from such tort claims.
The Institute for Justice argued that allowing courts to rely on the supremacy clause to shut down lawsuits would completely undermine the intent of Congress. Lawmakers strengthened the Federal Tort Claims Act following a pair of high-profile wrong-house raids in Collinsville, Illinois, in the early 1970s.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a member of the court’s liberal wing, wrote a concurring opinion stressing that Congress amended the law specifically in response to those raids. Court, she said, should not ignore the exception for law enforcement claims “or the factual context that inspired its passage.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, another member of the court’s liberal wing, signed onto that opinion.
The fact that Gorsuch wrote the opinion was notable. During arguments before the Supreme Court in April, Gorsuch seemed particularly dubious of the FBI’s handling of the Martin raid. Gorsuch, who was President Donald Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, is a conservative and frequent skeptic of federal government power.
“You might look at the address of the house before you knock down the door,” an incredulous Gorsuch pressed the lawyer representing the Justice Department. “How about making sure you’re on the right street? I mean, just the right street? Checking the street sign? Is that, you know, asking too much?”
The Justice Department argued in part that it should not be liable because federal law bars tort suits when a federal employee is exercising discretion in carrying out their work. In this case, the government argued, the agents had to exercise discretion in how they confirmed they were at the correct house.
This story is breaking and has been updated with additional details.
