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The legal questions were tangled, but some justices seemed incredulous at a government lawyer’s defense of a botched operation involving a battering ram and a flash-bang grenade.
April 29, 2025, 12:52 p.m. ET
Very early on a fall morning in 2017, F.B.I. agents knocked down the front door of a home in Atlanta with a battering ram. Guns drawn, they set off a flash-bang grenade and charged inside.
The couple who lived there, Hilliard Toi Cliatt and Curtrina Martin, barricaded themselves in a closet. The agents dragged Mr. Cliatt out at gunpoint and handcuffed him. They told Ms. Martin to keep her hands up as she pleaded to see her 7-year-old son, who had been asleep in another room.
As they questioned Mr. Cliatt, he gave his address. It was different from the one the agents had a warrant to enter.
One of the agents, Lawrence Guerra, had earlier identified the correct house, which he said looked similar and was nearby, on a different street. He said he had been misdirected on the morning of the raid by his GPS device.
The couple sued for false arrest, false imprisonment, assault, battery and other claims but lost in the lower courts on a variety of grounds, notably that government officials’ actions are protected from lawsuits when they perform a duty that involves discretion.
The legal questions in the case were a tangled series of exceptions and provisos involving the Federal Tort Claims Act, which only sometimes allows suits against the government notwithstanding the doctrine of sovereign immunity.
