A federal appeals court has ruled that an Atlanta family cannot take the United States to trial over an FBI raid on the wrong house, while reviving their constitutional claim against the agent who led the operation.
The Eleventh Circuit’s published decision is the latest turn in a case that already reached the Supreme Court. In 2017, an FBI SWAT team broke into Curtrina Martin’s home before dawn, detonated a flash-bang device and detained her then-fiancé while her seven-year-old son was in another room. Agents were looking for a suspected gang member who lived several houses away.
The family sued the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act and brought a Fourth Amendment claim against Agent Lawrence Guerra. On Wednesday, the three-judge panel affirmed summary judgment for the United States, concluding that the statute’s discretionary-function exception preserves sovereign immunity for the tort claims presented here.
The panel reached a different result on Guerra. It reversed the district court’s grant of qualified immunity, finding that the evidence, viewed in the family’s favour at the summary-judgment stage, could allow a reasonable jury to conclude that the agent failed to make reasonable efforts to avoid the error. That claim returns to the lower court; the ruling is not a finding that Guerra is liable.
The result exposes an uneasy divide in federal liability law. The Supreme Court last year rejected the Eleventh Circuit’s former view that the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause supplied the government with a separate defence to these claims. It sent the case back for a fresh examination of the Federal Tort Claims Act’s exceptions.
All three members of the panel wrote separately to question circuit precedent that they said compelled the government’s victory. The family’s lawyer has indicated that the plaintiffs may ask the full Eleventh Circuit to rehear that portion of the case. For now, the United States remains out, the claim against the individual agent remains alive, and no trial date has been set.
Read the Eleventh Circuit’s decision.
