The Supreme Court last week heard a case from a family whose home was wrongly raided by the FBI, after which they were barred from bringing their civil suit to trial. Before the Court: Should the plaintiffs have been able to sue the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA)?
Oral arguments got into the weeds of the FTCA, under which plaintiffs Curtrina Martin and Toi Cliatt were prohibited from suing, even though Congress revised that law in the 1970s to give recourse to victims of federal law enforcement misconduct. But there was one particularly instructive exchange between the Court and Frederick Liu, assistant to the solicitor general at the Justice Department—a back-and-forth that is decidedly less in the weeds.
Liu: The officers here were weighing public safety considerations, efficiency considerations, operational security, the idea that they didn't want to delay the start of the execution of the warrants because they wanted to execute all the warrants simultaneously. Those are precisely the sorts of policy tradeoffs that an officer makes in determining, 'Well, should I take one more extra precaution to make sure I'm at the right house?' Here, Petitioner suggests, for example, that the officer should have checked the house number on the mailbox.
Justice Neil Gorsuch: Yeah, you might look at the address of the house before you knock down the door.
Liu: Yes. And, and, as the district court found at 52(a), that sort of decision is filled with policy tradeoffs because checking the house—
Gorsuch: Really?
Liu: —number at the end of the driveway means exposing the agents to potential lines of fire from the windows.
Gorsuch: How about making sure you're on the right street? Is that…you know, asking too much?
