Supreme Court allows family’s suit against government for “wrong house” raid to continue

The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for a family’s lawsuit against the federal government to move forward. With the lawsuit, the family seeks to hold the government liable for a “wrong house” raid by FBI agents. 

In a unanimous opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the justices held that a federal appeals court in Atlanta applied the wrong legal test in ruling for the government, and they sent the case back to the appeals court for another look. 

The case has its roots in a 2017 pre-dawn raid by FBI agents on the home in suburban Atlanta where Hilliard Toi Cliatt lived with his partner, Curtrina Martin, and her 7-year-old son, G.W. The agents had intended to execute search warrants at 3741 Landau Lane, where they believed suspected gang members were hiding out. But instead, the personal GPS used by Lawrence Guerra, the FBI special agent who led the raid, directed him to 3756 Denville Trace, the Martin-Cliatt home. 

Agents broke down the door at the Denville Trace home and detonated a flash-bang grenade. They pulled Cliatt from the closet where he was hiding and handcuffed him and held Martin, who was half-naked, at gunpoint. But after seeing mail with the home’s address on it, an officer realized that the team had raided the wrong home. 

Martin and Cliatt filed a lawsuit against the United States in federal court in Georgia. They relied on the Federal Tort Claims Act, which waives the federal government’s general immunity from lawsuits for claims seeking compensation for injuries by federal employees “acting within the scope of their employment.” 

The FTCA contains 13 different exceptions to the waiver of immunity. Two of those are at issue in Martin’s case. The first, known as the intentional-tort exception, provides that the government cannot be sued for a variety of claims alleging intentional wrongdoing – such as “assault, battery, false imprisonment, false arrest, malicious prosecution, abuse of process, libel, slander, misrepresentation, deceit, or interference with contract rights.” That list, however, is followed by a provision – known as the law-enforcement proviso – that nonetheless allows such claims when they relate to the “acts or omissions” of investigative or law enforcement officers. 

The second exception, known as the discretionary-function exception, prohibits claims that are based on the exercise of an official’s “discretionary function” – that is, decisions involving “an element of judgment or choice.” 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled for the government. The family’s claims alleging that the agents had acted negligently, even if intentionally, could not go forward, it concluded, because they fell within the discretionary-function exception – specifically, because Guerra had “discretion in how he prepared for the warrant execution.” It then held that the family’s claims of alleged intentional wrongdoing were not barred under the intentional-tort exception because of the law-enforcement proviso. And that proviso, the court of appeals added, also trumped the other exceptions, such as the discretionary-function exception, that might have otherwise applied to the claims of intentional wrongdoing. 

The family’s lawsuit nonetheless could not go forward, the court of appeals explained, because the FTCA provides that the government is only liable if, under similar circumstances, a private person would be liable under the law of the jurisdiction where the government employee’s wrongful “act or omission occurred.” The government can defeat a claim, the court of appeals emphasized, if – as here – the conduct by the law enforcement official has some connection with advancing federal policy “and can reasonably be characterized as complying with the full range of federal law.” 

The family came to the Supreme Court, which on Thursday threw out the 11th Circuit’s decision and sent the case back to the lower court. Writing for a unanimous court, Gorsuch began by observing that Congress had placed the law-enforcement proviso at the end of the intentional-tort exception, rather than making it a stand-alone provision at the end of the list of exceptions. “Given that arrangement,” he wrote, “an ordinary reader would naturally presume that the proviso modifies only” the intentional-tort exception. And there is nothing about the proviso that “gives us reason to think it works differently.” Moreover, Gorsuch added, the proviso indicates that its definition of law enforcement officer applies only to the intentional-tort exception. “If Congress had wished the proviso to modify” all of the exceptions, “it might have provided a section-wide definition, rather than” the more limited one. 

Gorsuch then turned to the second question in the case: Whether the 11th Circuit was correct in holding that the federal government cannot be liable as long as the federal official’s acts had some connection with federal policy and complied with federal law. Because the federal government in the Supreme Court joined Martin in rejecting the 11th Circuit’s rule, the justices appointed a “friend of the court” – South Carolina lawyer Christopher Mills – to defend the lower court’s judgment. 

On Thursday, the justices sided with the government and the family. “Because the FTCA’s liability rule incorporates state law,” Gorsuch explained, “in most cases” – including this one – “there is no conflict for the” Constitution’s supremacy clause – which provides that the Constitution and federal laws are the “supreme Law of the Land” – “to resolve.” 

The court’s decision means, Gorsuch noted at the end of his opinion, that the court of appeals must consider whether the family’s claims – for both negligent and intentional wrongdoing – are barred by the discretionary-function exception. And if they are not, Gorsuch continued, then the court of appeals must consider only “whether, under Georgia state law, a ‘private individual under like circumstances’ would be liable for the acts and omissions the plaintiffs allege.” 

The court turned down the family’s request to decide “whether and under what circumstances the discretionary-function exception bars suits for wrong-house raids and similar misconduct.” Gorsuch acknowledged that “different lower courts have taken different views of” that exception, as well as that “important questions surround whether and under what circumstances that exception may ever foreclose a suit like this one.” “But those questions,” Gorsuch said, “lie well beyond the two we granted certiorari to address.” 

Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a concurring opinion, which was joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which she suggested that “there is reason to think the discretionary-function exception may not apply” to prohibit the family’s claims. “Even where a federal employee retains an element of choice” in carrying out her job, she emphasized, “the exception does not apply reflexively.” Indeed, she noted, the Supreme Court has instructed lower courts to consider whether the choice that the employee makes “is of the kind that the discretionary-function exception was designed to shield.” 

In this case, she observed, “executing a warrant always involves some measure of discretion. Yet it is hard to see,” she wrote, “how Guerra’s conduct in this case, including his allegedly negligent choice to use his personal GPS and his failure to check the street sign or house number on the mailbox before breaking down Martin’s door and terrorizing the home’s occupants, involved the kind of policy judgments that the discretionary-function exception was designed to protect.” 

Lawyers for the Institute for Justice, which represented the family, praised the decision. In a press release, they indicated that “[o]n remand, IJ and the Martin family will have the opportunity to explain why claims like theirs do not fall into any of the FTCA’s exceptions. Federal officers lack the discretion to raid the wrong house or, more broadly, to act unconstitutionally or carelessly in their work.”

Curtrina Martin said that the ruling “is a victory for us but also for everyone who is fighting for accountability and justice.” “This isn’t over,” she added, “but we look forward to continuing the fight.”