A woman is suing the U.S. government for FBI agents wrongly searching her home in Atlanta, Georgia. The U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear the points in the case.
Before dawn on Oct. 18, 2017, FBI agents broke into Trina Martin’s house. In her bedroom, agents barged in with guns drawn on her and her boyfriend at the time. Her 7-year-old son screamed for his mom from another room.
Martin, 46, said she couldn’t care for her child for what seemed like forever until police realized they had broken into the wrong house while looking for a possible gang member.
Tuesday, Martin’s lawyer will go to the Supreme Court to ask that her 2019 lawsuit against the U.S. government be brought back. The lawsuit accuses government officials of assault and battery, false arrest, and other violations.
In 2022, a federal judge in Atlanta threw out the case, and last year, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that decision.
The most important thing the judges will talk about is when people can sue the federal government to make law enforcement answer for their actions.
After two police raids on the wrong houses in 1974, Martin’s lawyers said it was clear that Congress approved those cases. They said that stopping the lawsuits would leave her and other people who had similar experiences with few options.
Tony Thomas, a spokesman for the FBI in Atlanta, told The Associated Press that the agency cannot speak on cases that are still being fought in court.
In Martin’s case, the government’s lawyers said that courts shouldn’t “second-guess” choices made by police. The FBI agents did research ahead of time and tried to find the right house. This raid was different from the “no-knock” raids that happened without a warrant in the 1970s, which led Congress to pass laws against them, the Justice Department said in court documents from the Biden administration onward.
When Martin’s case was thrown out by the 11th Circuit, they mostly agreed with that point, saying that courts can’t judge police officers who make “honest mistakes” during searches. The agent in charge of the raid said that his own GPS took him to the wrong spot. A few houses away was where the FBI’s target was.
Martin, Toi Cliatt (who was her boyfriend at the time), and her son were all devastated, she said.
“Feelings, thoughts, and memories will never be the same,” she told The Associated Press at the home that was searched on Friday. “Mentally, you can suppress it, but you can’t really get over it.”
They showed the officers where they were sleeping and the closet in the master bathroom where they hid. Croatt, 54, was also there.
Martin had to stop teaching track because the starting pistol made her think of the fake bombs the agents used in the raid. The truck driver Cliatt said he had to quit because he couldn’t sleep.
“The road is hypnotizing,” he said. “I became a liability to my company.”
Martin said that her son got so worried that he started ripping cloth threads out of his clothes and painting walls.
At first, Cliatt thought the raid was an attempt to break in, so he ran to his room to get his shotgun. Martin said her son still tells her that he thinks she might have been killed if she had gone up to the agents armed.
“The Federal Tort Claims Act gives a reason to sue for anything, it’s an FBI wrong-house raid like the one here,” Martin’s lawyers wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court.
Lawyers say that other U.S. appeals courts have read the law more favorably for people who were raided on the wrong homes. This has led to different legal standards that can only be settled by the high court.
After breaking down the door to the house, a member of the FBI SWAT team grabbed Cliatt from the closet and put him in handcuffs.
Court records show that one of the agents noticed that he did not have the tattoos that the suspect did. When the agent asked for Cliatt’s name and location, they didn’t match the suspect’s.
After agents realized they had broken into the wrong house, the room became quiet.
Once Cliatt was free, the police went to the right house and nabbed the person they were looking for there.
Later, the agent who led the raid went back to Martin’s house to say sorry and leave a business card with the name of a boss on it. Cliatt said that the family didn’t get any money from the government, not even for the damage to the house.
Martin said that hearing her son cry was the most upsetting thing about the raid.
“When you’re not able to protect your child or at least fight to protect your child, that’s a feeling that no parent ever wants to feel,” she noted.