Legal Docket: Knocking down the wrong door

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 2nd day of June, 2025. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER,HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

First, a little primer on the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

It says “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

REICHARD: To be secure in your house, safe in your home. That’s the relevant part of the Fourth Amendment we’ll be talking about today.

Specifically: What happens when government agents disrupt that security.

CURTRINA MARTIN: I was asleep.

October 17th, 2017, about 4:30 in the morning. This audio is from the Institute for Justice.

MARTIN: All of a sudden I hear a lot of banging.

IJ’s client. Curtrina Martin.

MARTIN: Bang, bang, bang.

EICHER: Martin and her boyfriend Toi Cliatt were sleeping when a SWAT team showed up to raid the house.

Six FBI agents in tactical gear, guns drawn, shouting commands. A flashbang grenade exploded in the dark.

Martin’s son Gabe was just seven back then:

GABE: It was like two guns put in my face at like one time. I was just really nervous. That was my main focus, like, I didn’t want to get killed.

Cliatt remembers trying to make sense of what was happening:

CLIATT: The bang was so loud and so abrupt. I just remember landing on my feet out of the bed. It startled me. So immediately that’s what came to my brains: someone had broken into the house and I need to protect everyone.

REICHARD: Problem was, the agents had raided the wrong house. They entered the correct address into GPS, but the system led them astray, by about 400 feet, to a house that looked similar: corner lot, big tree out front.

MARTIN: The one and most important thing that sticks out to me is my child, being alone, by hisself (sic) in a room, underneath the carpet shaking, shivering from fear because someone was standing over him with a gun.

Only after agents noticed a piece of mail with a different address and people who didn’t match the suspect’s photo did they realize the mistake.

They apologized, left, and told Martin she could call for compensation.

She did that, but the compensation didn’t come.

Martin lost wages. Her son was traumatized. The therapist needed to be paid.

MARTIN: At the time I was a track coach. And I had to give that up because the trauma from the grenade, at the starting line when they shot the gun off for the runners to start, it would send me through a frenzy.

EICHER: So, Martin and Cliatt sued under Georgia law, making claims like negligence and false arrest. She also sued under a federal law, the Federal Tort Claims Act. Congress passed the FTCA back in 1946. The point of it was to allow citizens to sue the federal government when it does them harm.

Let’s take a moment to understand some background law.

Normally, you can’t sue federal agents. Before 1946, the only way was to ask Congress to pass a private bill just for your case. You can imagine this is time consuming and expensive.

That’s why the Congress approved FTCA.

REICHARD: Then about 30 years later, Congress amended FTCA after a string of drug raids at the wrong houses in Illinois. That 1974 amendment was called the “law enforcement proviso.” It lets victims sue for certain intentional acts by federal officers— things like assault, battery, wrongful arrest, and false imprisonment.

But over the years, courts carved out a big exception: Government would not be held liable if the officer’s conduct was discretionary (meaning the officer used his own judgment) and that judgment, that use of discretion, is grounded in considerations of public policy.

So if a court finds those two things, that’s when sovereign immunity kicks back in. Then you can’t sue.

EICHER: At the Supreme Court, Patrick Jaicomo of Institute for Justice represented Martin.

JAICOMO: There’s no such thing as a discretionary, intentional tort. …If even proviso claims Congress amended the statute to affirmatively guarantee are barred by sovereign immunity, what is left of the Federal Tort Claims Act?

In other words, what happened to Martin is what the 1974 amendment was created to fix.

The government’s lawyer Frederick Liu didn’t deny a mistake, but argued it just doesn’t rise to a constitutional or legal violation.

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 of 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.

REICHARD: Justice Neil Gorsuch cut to the absurdity of letting government agents violate rights under the guise of “discretion.” Listen to this exchange with Liu for the government:

GORSUCH: No policy says: “don’t break down the wrong house, the door of a house?”

LIU: No, I — I — excuse me. Of course—

GORSUCH: And don’t traumatize its occupants? Really?

LIU: Of course, it’s the U.S. policy to execute the warrants at the right house, but state…

GORSUCH: I should hope so.

Liu reiterated those policy considerations of the officers: public safety, efficiency, operational security.

The exchange with Justice Gorsuch got more prickly:

LIU: Those are precisely the sort of policy tradeoffs an officer makes in determining, well should I take one more extra precaution to make sure I’m at the right house? Here petitioners suggest for example that the officer should’ve checked the house number…

GORSUCH: Yeah, you might look at the address of the house before you knock down the door?

And it continued on like that:

LIU: That sort of decision is filled with policy tradeoffs.

GORSUCH: Really.

LIU: Because checking the house number at the end of the driveway means exposing the agents to potential lines of fire…

GORSUCH: How about making sure you’re on the right street? Is that, is that, (laughs) Just the right street.

LIU: (Stammers)

GORSUCH: Checking the street sign. Is that asking too much?

EICHER: Lawyer Jaicomo for the family had the last word during rebuttal:

JAICOMO: There's no question that there was no policy here ... If you really, really meant to drop the pizza off at the right address, it doesn't matter, you still need to give a refund if you drop it off at the wrong address….

Winning here wouldn’t mean an automatic payout. Just a day in court to try to win one.

REICHARD: Alright, the justices handed down one opinion last week. It was a case about trains, oil, and how far environmental reviews should go. The court ruled that they went too far. We covered this case back in December and have a link in today’s transcript: It’s Seven County Infrastructure Coalition versus Eagle County.

The justices were unanimous in the decision, but not for all the same reasons. The case will end up narrowing the scope of a federal environmental law known by the acronym NEPA … the National Environmental Policy Act.

EICHER: At the center of the case is an 88-mile stretch of railroad in the Uinta Basin of Utah. The track connects oil producers in that remote area to the national freight network—so they can ship crude oil all the way to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Environmentalists had sued. They argued that the federal board that approved the project looked only at the 88 miles of new track—and not the broader effects… not the potential for spills or emissions in Colorado, not the increased refinery activity thousands of miles away in Texas and Louisiana. That argument did persuade a lower court and the judge blocked the project.

REICHARD: That’s what the Supreme Court reversed. It said the law, NEPA, allows for a check, not a chokehold. In other words—quoting from the opinion—NEPA is a “procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it.”

That means federal agencies must review the direct environmental effects of the projects they approve—not every distant or downstream consequence that might happen later. Bottom line: it’s a win for infrastructure and energy development, and a signal that courts won’t stretch NEPA beyond its original design.

EICHER: Finally, a news item: last week the FBI’s deputy director Dan Bongino announced on social media a new probe into the leak of the draft of the Dobbs decision in 2022. That’s the decision that overturned Roe v Wade and sent abortion policy back to the states.

Here’s Bongino on Fox News explaining why:

BONGINO: The place has taken a reputational hit. There is zero question about it. There are a lot of bad actors, one of them’s still out there causing us all kinds of trouble. So we had to fix it and rebuild public trust. One of the ways to do it is these cases of significant public interest that matter.

REICHARD: Marshal Gail Curley’s 8-month investigation turned up no culprits. Her probe received criticism in part because the justices were not asked to sign sworn affidavits as others with access to the draft opinion were. She was investigating her superiors, which also created a conflict of interest that undermined the credibility of the investigation.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

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