A SWAT Team Destroyed an Innocent Woman's House. The Supreme Court Won't Hear Her Case.
Whether or not the government is required under the 5th Amendment to pay such victims will remain an open question.
The Supreme Court last month declined to hear a case from an elderly woman whose house was destroyed by a SWAT team, leaving open the question of whether or not innocent people are constitutionally entitled to compensation when law enforcement lays waste to their property in pursuit of public safety.
In July 2020, while chasing a fugitive, police arrived at Vicki Baker's home in McKinney, Texas. They threw dozens of tear gas grenades inside, used explosives to break the front and garage doors, and drove a tank through her backyard fence, although Baker's daughter, Deanna Cook, had supplied them with a key to the home, a garage door opener, and the back gate code.
The suspect, Wesley Little, had previously worked for Baker as a handyman and barricaded himself inside her home while on the run from police. He had kidnapped a teenage girl, whom he released after the cops arrived. But Little himself refused to exit, prompting law enforcement to ravage the house. (He ultimately killed himself.)
Baker, who was in Montana when her house was destroyed, never contested that police acted in the best interest of the community when it sought to extract Little from her home. She took issue, however, with the subsequent response from the government, which refused to compensate her for the more than $50,000 in damages. Her homeowners insurance likewise declined to pay, as many policies explicitly do not cover damage caused by the government.
"I've lost everything," she told me in 2021. "I've lost my chance to sell my house. I've lost my chance to retire without fear of how I'm going to make my regular bills." Baker, who was undergoing treatment for stage 3 breast cancer when we spoke, had been preparing to retire with her husband in Montana. After the house was ruined, a buyer predictably withdrew. The government said she did not qualify as a "victim."
She is not the only person with such a story. At the core of the case and those like hers is whether or not the Constitution legally obligates the government to repay people who are not suspected of criminal wrongdoing but whose property is nevertheless destroyed by police in an attempt to protect the community. The Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment promises that private property cannot be taken for public use "without just compensation," though some lower courts have ruled that actions taken by police in stories like these operate under an exception to that rule.
Baker's case has slogged through the courts for years. A federal judge rejected the city's attempt to have her lawsuit dismissed, describing the interpretation of the 5th Amendment that would prevent her from suing as "untenable," and in 2022 a jury awarded her $59,656.59 in damages. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that judgment last year, ruling there was a "necessity" exception to the Takings Clause that foreclosed relief under federal law.
Some previous decisions suggest that such an exception may exist, wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a statement, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, concerning the Court's denial of certiorari. In Bowditch v. Boston (1879), for example, the high court said that the government did not have to pay a building owner after firefighters destroyed his structure in order to stop a fire from spreading. Yet the rulings on the books are not really analogous to Baker's "because the destruction of her property was necessary, but not inevitable," Sotomayor said. "Whether any such exception exists (and how the Takings Clause applies when the government destroys property pursuant to its police power) is an important and complex question that would benefit from further percolation in the lower courts prior to this Court's intervention."
In 2020, the justices declined to hear a similar case concerning a Colorado family who had to demolish their home and take out a $390,000 loan after a SWAT team blew up the house while seeking to apprehend a fugitive.
So for now, other victims will continue to meet a similar ending. In 2022, police ravaged Carlos Pena's California printing business and equipment after a fugitive barricaded himself inside; that same year, Amy Hadley's home in Indiana was ruined after a botched police investigation led them to her house in search of a suspect who had never been there. The government left them with nothing.
