Atlanta – Before the dawn of October 18, 2017, the FBI agents broke the main door of Trina Martin’s house in Atlanta, broke into their room and pointed to her already her then boyfriend when her 7 -year -old son shouted for her mother from another room.
Martin, blocked to comfort his son, shrunk in disbelief so he said he felt like eternity. But in a matter of minutes, the test was over. The agents realized that they had the wrong house.
On Tuesday, a Martin lawyer will go before the United States Supreme Court to ask judges to restore their 2019 lawsuit against the United States government accusing assault and aggression agents, false arrests and other violations.
A federal judge in Atlanta dismissed the lawsuit in 2022 and the 11th Court of Appeals of the United States Circuit confirmed that decision last year. The Supreme Court agreed in January to address the matter.
The key issue before the judges is in what circumstances people can sue the federal government in an effort to hold the police responsible. Martin’s lawyers say that Congress clearly allowed these demands in 1974, after a couple of police raids in incorrect houses reached the headlines, and blocking them would leave little resource for families like her.
FBI Atlanta spokesman Tony Thomas said in an email that the agency cannot comment on pending litigation. But government lawyers argued in the case of Martin that the courts should not be decisions to apply the “doubts” law. The FBI agents advanced the work and tried to find the right house, causing this raid to be fundamentally different from the raids without order and without knot that led to Congress to act in the 1970s, said the Department of Justice in judicial presentations that begin under the Biden administration.
By dismissing Martin’s case, the 11th circuit agreed largely with that argument, saying that the courts cannot guess police officers who make “honest mistakes” in searches. The agent who directed the raid said that his personal GPS led him to the wrong place. The FBI was looking for an alleged member of the gang a few houses away.
Martin, 46, said she, her then boyfriend, Toi Cliatt, and her son were traumatized.
“We will never be the same, mental, emotionally, psychologically,” said Friday at the House of Stuco, which was raided. “Mentally, you can suppress it, but you really can’t overcome it.”
She and Cliatt pointed out where they were sleeping when the agents entered and the main bathroom closet where they hid.
Martin stopped training the track because the initial gun reminded him of Flashbang’s Granada that the agents left. Cliatt, 54, said he couldn’t sleep, forcing him to leave his truck driving.
“The road is hypnotizing,” he said about driving tired. “I became a responsibility for my company.”
Martin said his son got extremely anxious, taking threads from his clothes and peeling the painting from the walls.
Initially, Cliatt thought that the raid was an attempted robbery, so he ran to the closet, where he maintained a shotgun. Martin said his son still expresses fear of having died if he had faced the agents while he was armed.
“If the federal grievance claims law provides a cause of action for anything, it is an incursion of inactivity such as the FBI carried out here,” Martin’s lawyers wrote in a brief for the Supreme Court.
Other Courts of Appeals of the United States have interpreted the law more favorable for victims of the raids of the erroneous law, creating conflicting legal standards that only the highest court in the nation can resolve, they say. Public interest groups throughout the ideological spectrum have urged the Supreme Court to revoke the 11th circuit ruling.
After breaking the door of the house, a member of the FBI Swat team took Cliatt out of the closet and put it handcuffed.
But one of the agents noticed that he did not have the tattoos of the suspect, according to judicial documents. He asked for the name and address of Cliatt. Neither coincided with those of the suspect. The room was silent when the agents realized that they had raided the wrong house.
They were not imposed on Cliatt and went to the right house, where they executed the order and arrested the man they were looking for.
The agent who directed the raid later returned to apologize and leave a presentation card with the name of a supervisor. But the family did not receive compensation from the government, even for the damage to the house, said Cliatt.
Martin said the most heartbreaking part of the raid were his son’s shouts.
“When you cannot protect your child or at least fight to protect your child, it is a feeling that no father wants to feel,” he said.
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Whitehurst reported from Washington.
