The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected a petition from a family whose home was wrongly raided by a SWAT team, despite that law enforcement were found to have violated the victims' Fourth Amendment rights, reported Reason Magazine.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson
would have granted the petition, falling two votes short of the Court's threshold.
In March 2019, Lt. Mike Lewis led police
to Karen Jimerson and James Parks' home in Lancaster*, Texas, ultimately
ordering SWAT to "break and rake" the house, shattering all the front
windows, the shards from which reportedly rained down on their sleeping
children. They also set off a flash grenade and broke down the door, guns
drawn. But the target structure, a suspected methamphetamine stash house, was
located two doors down. Police would not realize until after holding the
Jimerson-Parks family—including a half-naked Karen, who had just gotten out of
the bath—at gunpoint.
The two houses were differentiable. Most notably,
they had different house numbers. But the Jimerson-Parks family home departed
from the target in other significant ways: It had a wheelchair ramp and a
porch, for example, while the alleged stash house had a fence and no porch,
information Lewis was provided prior to the execution of the warrant.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas declined to give Lewis qualified immunity, which shields state and local government actors from civil suits if the alleged misconduct was not "clearly established" as unconstitutional in a prior court precedent. "The record in this case contains ample evidence," wrote Judge Sam A. Lindsay, "for a reasonable jury to conclude that [Lewis] acted objectively unreasonable prior to the execution of the search warrant."
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit
reversed that ruling by a vote of 2–1, concluding that because Lewis had done
more than "nothing" to prepare for the raid, he did not violate
clearly established law. Under qualified immunity analysis, proving a
constitutional violation isn't enough—Jimerson and Parks also had to prove that
the relevant case law on the subject sufficiently put Lewis on notice that his
conduct was illegal.
In dissent, Judge James L. Dennis said that it did.
"Lewis did not even check the number of the house before instructing the
SWAT team to execute the warrant on the Jimersons' home," he wrote,
adding that "it is undisputed that Lewis violated the Jimersons' Fourth
Amendment rights in executing a SWAT-style entry into their home without a
warrant."
The Supreme Court previously ruled in Maryland v. Garrison (1987)
that the Fourth Amendment requires officers to make "a reasonable effort
to ascertain and identify the place intended to be searched." The U.S.
Courts of Appeals for the 8th, 9th, and 11th Circuits have held that the ruling
clearly established that law enforcement violate the law when they search a
house without properly verifying that its conspicuous features match those of
the target. The 5th Circuit, however, said that decision was too generalized to
put police on notice. The Institute for Justice, the public interest law
firm representing Jimerson and Parks, had urged the
Supreme Court to take up the case to clarify that split.
The high court is poised to hear
a different case concerning a wrong-house raid, although the issue the
justices consider will be different. In October 2017, the FBI detonated a
flash grenade inside and ripped the door from the hinges of the house where
Curtrina Martin lived with her then-fiancé, Toi Cliatt, and her young son,
Gabe. Agents stormed into Martin and Cliatt's bedroom, holding him at gunpoint
until they realized their error. The leader of that raid, Lawrence Guerra, was
also granted immunity, which the Court will not reevaluate. Instead, the
justices will decide if the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit erred
when it declined to let Martin sue under the Federal Tort Claims Act—the law
that was revised in the 1970s to include a law enforcement proviso for situations
almost identical to Martin's.
Still up for debate, however, is whether or not a
reasonable law enforcement officer knows he must check the features and address
of his target house before raiding it, should he want to stay within the bounds
of the Constitution.
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