GRANTED! Supreme Court Will Hear FBI Wrong-House Raid Case

The Institute for Justice is headed back to the U.S. Supreme Court! 

This is our 13th trip to the nation’s highest court, the third in our five-year-old Project on Immunity and Accountability, and the first in our growing cohort of cases representing innocent victims of SWAT raids.

Early one morning, before the sun began to rise over Atlanta, Trina Martin, her then-partner Toi Cliatt, and her son, Gabe, were jolted awake by a loud bang in their living room. Thinking they were being robbed, Toi pulled Trina into their closet and reached for his legally owned firearm, prepared to defend his family. Just as he was about to grab it, a masked man yanked Toi out of the closet, threw him to the ground, and handcuffed him.

Watch the case video!

Toi soon learned that the intruders weren’t robbers. They were heavily armed FBI SWAT agents who had busted down the family’s front door and detonated a flashbang grenade in their living room. As the agents shouted questions at Toi from behind the barrel of a rifle, Trina pleaded with them to let her see her son (then 7 years old), who was cowering under the covers in his bedroom. But the agents refused. Toi eventually told the officers his address, and all the noise stopped. 

The SWAT team had a warrant—for a house with a different address, on a different street, owned by a different person. Once the agents realized their mistake, they left and proceeded to raid the correct house, which was about a block away. The agent in charge of the SWAT team later returned, said he was sorry, and handed Toi a business card.

But when Toi called the number on the card, the federal government refused to make things right. Out of options, Trina and Toi sued the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Congress passed the FTCA in 1946 to ensure that innocent people harmed by federal employees could receive a remedy. And in 1974, Congress expanded the FTCA specifically to ensure that victims of federal wrong-house raids—just like Trina, Toi, and Gabe—could hold the government accountable.

Congress, in other words, could not have been clearer. But still, the 11th Circuit ruled that the family was out of luck. To bar their lawsuit, the court expanded the FTCA’s limited exceptions and invented new ones out of whole cloth. 

But Trina and Toi weren’t done fighting. That’s when IJ stepped in to petition the Supreme Court to take up their case. To bolster our persuasive petition, we even secured a bipartisan amicus brief from members of Congress affirming our interpretation of the FTCA. And in January, the Court accepted the case on an accelerated schedule—we’re gearing up for argument at the end of April, when we’ll ask the Court to confirm that Congress meant what it said when it amended the FTCA to cover wrong-house raids.

In our fight to restore accountability, IJ must contend with decades of entrenched court-created immunities for government officials and an often-reflexive deference to government. But if anything is certain, it’s that courts cannot snuff out claims that Congress explicitly allows. The FBI raided the wrong house. Now the Supreme Court can make things right by ensuring the victims have a remedy.

Dylan Moore is an IJ attorney.