The FBI Wrongly Raided This Family's Home. Now the Supreme Court Will Hear Their Case.

Curtrina Martin's petition attracted support from a bipartisan group of lawmakers.

When asked about the evening the FBI mistakenly broke into her home, detonating a flash grenade in the house and ripping her door from its hinges, Curtrina Martin struggles to find a way to describe what that does to a person. "I don't know if there is a proper word that I can use," she told me last year.

The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will evaluate whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled correctly when it barred Martin from suing over that nightmare scenario—a case that has attracted bipartisan attention from Congress.

In October 2017, the FBI arrived at Martin's house, which she shared with her then-fiancé, Hilliard Toi Cliatt, and her 7-year-old son, Gabe. The agents were searching for a man named Joseph Riley, who lived approximately one block over. After law enforcement found Martin and Cliatt hiding in the closet, police dragged Cliatt out and handcuffed him, while another officer screamed and pointed his gun at Martin, who says she fell on a rack in the chaos.

A panel for the 11th Circuit wrote that the two structures "share several conspicuous features." For example, they are "beige in color" and have "a large tree in the front." Since it was dark outside, the judges said, it would have been "difficult to ascertain the house numbers on the mailboxes." Lawrence Guerra, who led the raid, thus received immunity.

The Supreme Court won't reconsider that grant. Instead, it will evaluate a different part of the 11th Circuit's decision that forbade relief elsewhere. As I wrote in August:

Martin and Cliatt also sued under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which allows victims of abuse to bring certain state torts against the federal government. There are a few wide-ranging exceptions to that, too, however. Such claims are doomed if the government's misconduct arose from a duty that "involves discretion." Since "the FBI did not have stringent policies or procedures in place that dictate how agents are to prepare for warrant executions," Guerra had discretion, the 11th Circuit said, and is thus protected. Next came the Supremacy Clause, the rule that bars state tort claims if "a federal official's acts 'have some nexus with furthering federal policy and can reasonably be characterized as complying with the full range of federal law,'" as the court recently reiterated in Kordash v. United States (2022). The 11th Circuit said that stipulation foreclosed Martin and Cliatt's remaining claims.

The FTCA was explicitly revised in the 1970s to include a proviso allowing victims like Martin to sue the federal government. A bipartisan group in Congress—made up of Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), and Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) as well as Reps. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), Nikema Williams (D–Ga.), Harriet Hageman (R–Wyo.), and Dan Bishop (R–N.C.)—had urged the Court to take up the case for that reason.

That proviso was added after federal agents raided the homes of Herbert and Evelyn Giglotto and Donald and Virginia Askew. Neither family was suspected of a crime. In May 1973, The New York Times covered testimony before the Senate on those wrong-home raids: "Mr. and Mrs. Giglotto testified under oath today that they were handcuffed by screaming agents, thrown on their bed, verbally abused with a stream of obscenities and repeatedly threatened with death while an agent held a cocked gun to Mr. Giglotto's head," the paper reported, adding that "much of their apartment was ransacked and damaged."

Thus the law enforcement proviso was born. "The proviso's plain text provides—and it was enacted specifically to guarantee—that victims of wrong-house raids by federal agents like the Collinsville families can seek redress from the United States over wrong-house raids," the lawmakers wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court. "Yet the Eleventh Circuit's decision nullifies the law-enforcement proviso in precisely that circumstance."

Patrick Jaicomo, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice who is representing Martin, says that if the 11th Circuit's ruling is allowed to stand, "the FTCA does almost nothing." The law "was enacted as a sweeping waiver of sovereign immunity by Congress," he adds, "and courts disregard our constitutional separation of powers when they restore that immunity—as the 11th Cir. did here."