Before dawn, a seven-year-old boy was sound asleep in his home in Atlanta, Ga., when seven heavily armed FBI SWAT agents smashed into his home with a battering ram and detonated a flashbang grenade.
Awakened by the noise, the boy hid under the covers. In a moment, agents with bright flashlights and laser gun sights swept into his room and ordered him to stay in bed.
Minutes later, the agents rushed out, having discovered that they were in the wrong house.
The lead agent left a business card behind, but there was no help from the federal government when the family called. With nowhere to turn, the family filed a lawsuit hoping the government would cover the therapy bills, lost wages and other expenses resulting from the trauma of their near-death experience.
Seven years on, the lawsuit filed by Trina Martin, her son Gabe and her former partner Toi Cliatt will reach the Supreme Court. The court will decide whether the family can move forward and ask a jury for compensation — or whether their suit ends without the government paying a dime.
Congress understood the damage that can be caused by wrong-house raids. That’s why, in 1974, it allowed lawsuits against the government for precisely this type of conduct. A critical reform to the Federal Tort Claims Act was passed in the wake of two raids in which innocent families in Collinsville, Ill., were terrorized by federal narcotics agents acting without warrants.
During the first break-in, 16 agents raided the home of a sleeping couple, a man and his pregnant wife. The agents threw the man on the bed and handcuffed him. They tore down shelves, ripped clothes out of drawers and threw a television set across a room before realizing they were at the wrong house and leaving. In the second raid, residents cried out for the police, not knowing the assailants battering down their doors and holding them at gunpoint were federal officers.
Both families sued under the Federal Tort Claims Act but were barred, because the law at the time excluded intentionally wrongful acts. (In 1946, Congress decided against having to defend employees anytime they got into a “fight with some fellow.”) But in 1974, moved by the stories of these raids, Congress had a change of heart, expanding the act to include intentional torts, if committed by federal law enforcement officers.
According to contemporary congressional statements, it was only right that the federal government would provide compensation for such acts. After all, when the government trusts its officers to use the law enforcement powers at their disposal, it is important that the public have a means to be compensated when those powers are misused.
But courts have moved far away from the original path that Congress charted through the Federal Tort Claims Act. When the Martin family sued the federal government for the FBI’s wrong-house raid, both the district court and the 11th Circuit held that there was no remedy for the family. Fortunately, the Supreme Court can and should reorient the courts to align with the statute and provide for the Martin family and others who similarly suffer.
When the intentional actions of federal law enforcement agents end up harming innocent people, the federal government — not its innocent victims — should bear the cost.
Gabe has grown up over the course of the lawsuit and is now a strong, 14-year-old young man who will sit in the gallery of the Supreme Court and hear his case being argued. He hopes that Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words ring true, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Patrick Jaicomo and Anya Bidwell lead the Institute for Justice’s Project on Immunity and Accountability. They represent the Martin family before the Supreme Court.
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