Case Story: Holding Police Accountable for a fourth amendment violation

DISCLAIMER:

CASE RESULTS DEPEND ON A VARIETY OF FACTORS UNIQUE TO EACH CASE. CASE RESULTS DO NOT GUARANTEE OR PREDICT A SIMILAR RESULT IN ANY FUTURE CASE.

Few places in the United States enjoy more legal protection than a person’s home. Often called one’s “castle,” the home is a sanctuary, a refuge, and a place of retreat from society.

This is especially true with respect to the prying eyes of the state.

A game of cat-and-mouse since time immemorial, the state seeks more and more access to the private lives of its citizens, while its citizens fight to maintain a healthy boundary between what occurs within the confines of their own homes and the state’s knowledge thereof.

Put simply, the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent a government of jackbooted thugs coming into our homes whenever they want.. Meaning nosiness is only allowed when authorized by a judge.

That’s what this case is about.

Police entered our client’s home without her permission, armed with what turned out to be an illegal warrant, to find and arrest her brother. Believing in good faith that her brother was not there at the time of the encounter, our client told police he was not there.

This turned out to be incorrect—she didn’t know that her brother had come into her house—so police arrested our client and charged her with lying to police and aiding a fugitive.

Once charged, she hired our firm to fight the case. We immediately began looking into the police’s version of events because it seemed like there was more to the story than they were telling. Our gut turned out to be right, as we eventually learned that most everything related to the police coming to our client’s home and entering it violated the Fourth Amendment.

So we filed a legal challenge to dismiss the case. And before we could litigate it, the state dropped the case.

Here’s how we did it.

The Charge

To understand our client’s charges, you must first understand her brother’s charges. Our client’s brother had what appeared to be a warrant out for his arrest.

So officers were looking to execute the warrant and arrest the brother. The problem is, they mixed up the address where the brother lived.

They believed the brother lived at our client’s house. This was because the house used to belong to our client’s parents, and so at some point our client and all her siblings had the home as their address.

But the brother no longer lived there, and instead had his own home and address.

Despite this, police simply listed the address that they had on file. They did not try find the right address or even confirm the wrong address.

They simply found an address and ran with it.

That’s what brought them to our client’s house that day.

None of this, of course, was known by our client at the time.

So when officers showed up looking for her brother to arrest him, our client objected to them entering her home absent a warrant. The reason she was adamant was that she knew he did not live there, so she did not understand how the police could have possibly gotten an arrest warrant for a residence where her brother did not live.

Their warrant now in question, the police faced a choice: check to see if the address on the warrant was correct or press forward.

They wrongly decided to press forward.

And they did so by showing our client what turned out not to be the actual warrant, but simply a police printout showing the brother’s address being our client’s home.

Tricked into thinking the warrant was legitimate, our client let officers inside to look for her brother, but not before telling them they were wasting their time because he was not there.

She said that based on her good-faith belief that her brother had left the home earlier in the day. In other words, while her brother had been there, he wasn’t currently there.

This turned out to be wrong, however. Unknown to our client—because she was attending to a foster baby she had just taken custody of—her brother had remained in the home. So when officers found him hiding in a closet, they were doubly mad.

Mad at the brother for hiding, but also mad at our client for what seemed like her lying to protect her brother.

To punish her perceived noncompliance, the police arrested our client and charged her with lying to police in an attempt to harbor her brother, technically a fugitive.

She spent two nights in jail, bailed herself out, and then immediately hired our law firm. After hearing her story, we began investigating the matter with an eye towards making a claim that the police had violated her Fourth Amendment rights.

And that’s exactly what we ended up doing.

The Legal Challenge

Our challenge was straightforward: police entered our client’s home without her permission or a warrant that allowed them to be there. In truth, the warrant allowed them to enter the brother’s home to arrest him; not her home.

The address mix-up was the lynchpin.

And since they entered the home illegally, everything they heard and saw inside was fruit of the poisonous tree—meaning it, too, had to be suppressed.

So that would mean what our client told the police about not thinking her brother was in the house, as well as the discovery of the brother in a closet.

Originally, the state argued the police hadn’t committed a constitutional violation, and instead had made a reasonable mistake with respect to the two addresses.

But the ground began to get shakier under their feet when we learned that there was another person inside the home when the police arrived who witnessed what happened.

And that person supported our client’s version of events. When interviewed by our investigator, he stated that he had told the police before they entered the home that our client—the home’s owner—would not know whether or not her brother was at the residence because she had been dealing with the new foster baby all day.

Basically proof our client wasn’t lying to police when she told them what she did.

But the witness was never mentioned in the police report, nor did body cam footage from any officer exist that had the witness interaction on it.

To us, this didn’t seem like a coincidence, but a cover-up.

So we pressed forward with our legal challenge, in search of getting answers for the missing pieces to the puzzle.

The Dismissal

Before we could get our answers, the state dismissed the charges against our client. Of course they didn’t admit it was because of their misconduct, but it’s hard to draw any other conclusion.

When the state feels strongly about its case and conduct, it does not dismiss charges.

It fights them tooth and nail.

That’s not what happened here.

Here, the state gave up. Which to us speaks volumes.

But it’s also deeply unsatisfying. Our client was happy to have the criminal charge dismissed—as she had never been charged with a crime before in her life—but she couldn’t help but be left wanting answers.

And accountability.

The 1983 Lawsuit

Because we felt so, too, we decided not to just let the incident fade away. We made plan to file a civil lawsuit against the police officers who committed what we believe is unconstitutional conduct against our client.

The lawsuit is called a 1983 lawsuit because that’s the name of the federal statute that allows people to sue state officials who they believe violated their constitutional rights.

The case hasn’t been filed yet, but it will be in short order.

And when it is, we hope to provide our client with what we couldn’t in her criminal matter—answers and accountability.

The Takeaway

It’s always tempting to take a “shoot now, ask questions later” approach to life. And often such an approach works relatively well.

But when it goes wrong, its consequences are great.

Here is a perfect example.

Had the police simply slowed down, figured out the discrepancy between the two addresses at issue, and actually listened to our client before barging into her house, we likely wouldn’t be in the position we are in.

But we are. And we are committed to keep fighting on her behalf until we can right the wrongs committed against her.

Whether that’s in the criminal or civil realm, or both, we remain committed.