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.
Much of the argument was technical, and the court seemed headed for a modest ruling that would send the case back to the lower courts for further consideration.
But several justices seemed incredulous when Frederick Liu, a lawyer for the federal government, said the raid did not violate any policy.
“No policy says don’t break down the wrong door?” Justice Neal M. Gorsuch asked. “Don’t traumatize the occupants? Really?”
Mr. Liu clarified his position. “It’s the United States’ policy to execute the warrants at the right house,” he said.
“I should hope so,” Justice Gorsuch responded.
Mr. Liu nonetheless said that the agents’ discretion in planning the raid was “filled with policy considerations” including “weighing public safety considerations, efficiency considerations, operational security.”
The plaintiffs sought to second-guess those judgments, he said, by saying, for example, that the agents should have checked the house number.
Justice Gorsuch said, “Yeah, you might look at the address of the house before you have knocked down the door.”
But Mr. Liu said that “checking the house number at the end of the driveway means exposing the agents to potential lines of fire.”
Justice Gorsuch continued. “How about making sure you’re on the right street?” he asked. “Checking a street sign — is that asking too much?”
Mr. Liu said the agents had made a “reasonable mistake.” He added that a 1974 amendment to the Federal Tort Claims Act seeking to make it easier to sue over wrong-house raids after notorious ones in Collinsville, Ill., did not apply to the one in Atlanta.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was unpersuaded. “That is so ridiculous,” she said. “Congress is looking at the Collinsville raid and providing a remedy to people who have been wrongfully raided, and you’re now saying, ‘no, they really didn’t want to protect them fully.’”
Patrick M. Jaicomo, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, which represents the plaintiffs in the case, Martin v. United States, No. 24-362, said “there’s no question that there was no policy here.”
“As my friend said,” he added, referring to Mr. Liu, “the government’s policy is to raid the right house. They didn’t do that. The preparation is kind of immaterial to the ultimate result 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.”
