SCOTUS rejects case testing the limits of qualified immunity

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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