FBI has “Discretionary Authority” to Raid the Wrong House

That is the opinion of the 11th circuit court who on April 22 of this year denied a petition filed on behalf of an Atlanta family who had their 4th amendment rights violated by the FBI in a wrong house no knock raid 7 years ago after the SWAT team went to a house with different address (posted on the mailbox) on a completely different street that didn’t match the one on their warrant. The family sought remuneration for the civil rights violations under the Federal Tort Claims Act but had their claims barred under the discretionary function exception of the act because ‘the FBI did not have stringent policies or procedures in place that dictate how agents are to prepare for warrant executions’ and thus the wrongful raid was ‘susceptible to policy analysis.’ Just to be clear, congress amended the Federal Tort Claims Act in 1974 in response to a wrong house raid conducted by feds in 1973 to include a law enforcement proviso that guarantees innocent Americans subject to raids a cause of action against the federal government. In the 2009 case of Nguyen (Win) v. U.S. the same court held that the discretionary function exception does not apply to claims that fall within the scope of the law enforcement provisio; here, however, they denied the similar claims because no statute, regulation or internal operating procedure prescribed the SWAT commander’s course of action and that his decision "involved policy considerations and should not be subject to judicial second-guessing." The court also denied that the SWAT commander and his team violated the family’s 4th amendment rights on the basis that it was up to the SWAT commander to decide how to proceed with the raid. Such a sweeping assessment of discretionary authority would give federal LEOs sovereign immunity to commit as many ‘mistakes’ and violate whatever constitutional rights they deem necessary as long as they don’t make any internal policies restricting such things themselves.