Atlanta (AP)-before sunrise On October 18, 2017, FBI agents broke the front door of Trina Martin's Atlanta house, rushed into her bedroom and pointed to her and her boyfriend when her 7-year-old son shouted at his mother from another room.
Martin, blocked by comforting her son, writhed in full disbelief for what she said felt like an eternity. But within a few minutes the test was over. The agents realized that they had the wrong house.
On Tuesday, a lawyer for Martin will go for the US Supreme Court to ask the judges to restore her 2019 right case against the US government that accuses the agents of abuse and battery, false arrest and other violations.
A federal court in Atlanta rejected the case in 2022 and the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that decision last year. The Supreme Court agreed in January to record the case.
The most important issue for the judges is under what circumstances people can sue the federal government in an attempt to keep law enforcement responsible. The lawyers of Martin say that the congress clearly allowed in 1974 for those lawsuits, after a few law enforcement attacks on the wrong houses had reached the headlines, and blocking them would leave little story for families like them.
FBI Atlanta spokesperson Tony Thomas said in an e -mail that the agency cannot comment on the hanging court cases. But in the case of Martin's case, lawyers for the government argued that courts should not be 'decisions about law enforcement'. The FBI agents brought to work and tried to find the right house, making this raid fundamentally different from the no-knock, just raids that caused the congress to act in the 1970s, the Ministry of Justice said in the court applications that started under the Biden administration.
By rejecting Martin's case, the 11th circuit largely agreed with that argument, and said that courts cannot give a second stingy police officers who make “fair errors” in searches. The agent who led the raid said that his personal GPS led him to the wrong place. The FBI was looking for a presumably gang member, a few houses away.
Martin, 46, said that she, her then boyfriend, toi Cliatt, and her son remained traumatized.
“We will never be the same, mental, emotional, psychological,” she said on Friday in the neat, stucco house that was robbed. “Mentally, you can suppress it, but you can't really get over it.”
She and Cliatt pointed where they slept when the agents broke down and the main cupboard of the main bathroom where they hid.
Martin stopped coaching -track because the starting gun reminded her of the Flashbang grenade who left the agents. Cliatt, 54, said he couldn't sleep and forced him to leave his truck lane.
“The road is hypnotizing,” he said about tired driving. “I became liability towards my company.”
Martin said her son became extremely anxious, pulled threads out of his clothes and paved paint from walls.
Cliat initially thought the raid was a burglary attempt, so he ran to the cupboard, where he held a shotgun. Martin said that her son still pronounced fear that she could have die if she had confronted the agents while she was armed.
“If the Federal Dort Claims Act offers a cause of action for something, it is a wrong house that the FBI has carried out here,” Martin's lawyers wrote in a short at the Supreme Court.
Other courts of the US have interpreted the law more favorably for victims of wrong raids of law enforcement, creating conflicting legal standards that can only solve the highest court of the nation, they say. Public-Interest groups in the ideological spectrum urged the Supreme Court to destroy the statement of the 11th circuit.
After he had broken the door to the house, a member of the FBI Swat team Cliatt team dragged out of the closet and brought him into handcuffs.
But one of the agents noted that he did not have the tattoos of the suspect, according to judicial documents. He asked for the name and address of Cliatt. Neither of them corresponded to that of the suspect. The room became quiet when agents realized that they had attacked the wrong house.
They dismissed Cliatt and left for the right house, where they carried out the order and the man arrested what they were looking for.
The agent who led the raid later returned to apologize and leave a calling card with the name of a supervisor. But the family did not receive reimbursement from the government, not even for the damage to the house, Cliatt said.
Martin said that the most harrowing part of the raid was the cries of her son.
“If you can't protect your child or at least fight to protect your child, that's a feeling that no parent ever wants to feel,” she said.
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Whitehurst reported from Washington.
