ATLANTA (AP) – Before dawn of October 18, 2017, FBI agents broken down the front door of Atlanta's house in Trina Martin, stormed her room and pointed weapons on her and her boyfriend while her 7 -year -old son shouted for her mother from another room.
Martin, prevented from comforting his son, curled up with disbelief for what she said looked like an eternity. But in a few minutes, the event was over. The agents realized that they had the bad house.
On Tuesday, a lawyer for Martin will be before the United States Supreme Court to ask the judges to restore his pursuit in 2019 against the United States government accusing agents of aggression and battery, false arrests and other violations.
An Atlanta federal judge rejected the prosecution in 2022 and the 11th United States Court of Appeal confirmed this decision last year. The Supreme Court agreed in January to resume the question.
The key question before the judges is in the circumstances that people can pursue the federal government in order to hold responsible police. Martin's lawyers say that Congress clearly authorized these prosecution in 1974, after a pair of raids for applying the law on bad houses made the headlines, and blocking them would allow little appeal to families like her.
FBI Atlanta spokesperson Tony Thomas said that in an email that the agency could not comment on the current disputes. But government lawyers have argued in the case of Martin that the courts should not be decisions of “second” application of the law. The FBI agents have advanced the work and tried to find the right house, which makes this raid fundamentally different from raids without cutting and without a mandate that led the congress to act in the 1970s, said the Ministry of Justice in court documents starting with the Biden administration.
By rejecting the case of Martin, the 11th circuit was largely agree with this argument, claiming that the courts cannot guess the police who make “honest errors” in the excavations. The agent who led the raid said that his personal GPS had led him to the wrong place. The FBI was looking for an alleged member of a gang with a few houses.
Martin, 46, said that she, her then boyfriend, you Cliatt, and her son were traumatized.
“We will never be the same, mentally, emotionally, psychologically,” she said at the neat and stucco that was attacked on Friday. “Mentally, you can delete it, but you can't really get it.”
She and Cliatt pointed out where they were sleeping when the agents broke out and the main closet of the bathroom where they hid.
Martin stopped the trainer because the starting pistol reminded him of the Flashbang Grenade that the agents left. Cliatt, 54, said he couldn't sleep, forcing him to leave his truck driving work.
“The road is hypnotizing,” he said about tired driving. “I became a responsibility to my business.”
Martin said his son had become extremely anxious, pulling sons from his clothes and peeling wall painting.
Cliatt initially thought that the raid was an attempted burglary, so he ran to the closet, where he kept a shotgun. Martin said his son always expresses the fear of being able to die if he had confronted the agents when he was armed.
“If the federal law on complaints of crimes provides for a cause of action for anything, it is a bad house raid like the one that the FBI has organized here,” wrote the lawyers of Martin in a memory in the Supreme Court.
Other American appeal courts have interpreted the law more favorably for the victims of erroneous raids of the application of laws, creating contradictory legal standards that only the highest court in the country can resolve, they say. Public interest groups through the ideological spectrum have urged the Supreme Court to cancel the 11th circuit decision.
After decomposing the door of the house, a member of the FBI Swat team fired Cliatt out of the closet and put it handcuffed.
But one of the agents noticed that he did not have the suspect's tattoos, according to court documents. He asked for the name and address of Cliatt. Neither has matched those of the suspect. The room was calm while the agents realized that they had made a descent into the bad house.
They have no contact with Cliatt and left for the right house, where they executed the mandate and arrested the man they were looking for.
The agent leading the raid later returned to apologize and leave a business card with the name of a supervisor. But the family has received no compensation from the government, not even for damage to the House, said Cliatt.
Martin said that the most painful part of the raid was his son's cries.
“When you are unable to protect your child or at least fight to protect your child, it is a feeling that no parent never wants to feel,” she said.
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Whitehurst reported in Washington.
