Jun 8, 2021,12:55pm EDT|1,847 views
Cop Who Led Accidental No-Knock Raid Against 78-Year-Old Grandfather Can’t Be Sued, Court Rules
Nick Sibilla
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksi...LDPynZR9FuFTn0gCosAo&sh=3bc473c968b3It was a police raid John Oliver called “almost cartoonishly idiotic.” Looking to apprehend a violent drug dealer at his home in McDonough, Georgia, more than two dozen officers executed a no-knock warrant in February 2018. Smashing the door open with a battering ram, before tossing a flash grenade inside, officers stormed in with guns drawn, and quickly subdued the home’s lone resident, forcing him down on the ground.
But it wasn’t their man—police raided the wrong house. Instead, officers had just handcuffed Onree Norris, then a 78-year-old grandfather with heart trouble. At the time, Norris was simply watching TV in his bedroom when he heard a “thunderous sound:” Members from the Henry County Sheriff’s Office Special Response Team had just knocked down all three doors to his house. When Norris moved into his hallway, he was greeted by multiple officers “wearing military style gear pointing assault rifles at him,” who threw him to the floor.
Until that day when police mistakenly broke down the doors to his house, Norris never had any trouble with the law. But since his next-door neighbor turned out to be a drug dealer, Norris was effectively punished for the police’s mistakes.
Lambasting the raid as a “blatant constitutional violation,” Norris initially sued multiple officers as well as Capt. David Cody, who led the Henry SRT and exercised “overall tactical control” for the no-knock raid. But the other officers were soon shielded by qualified immunity, leaving the captain as the sole defendant.
As Norris alleged in a complaint, Capt. Cody “did not check to make sure Henry SRT members were going to the correct address or otherwise perform adequate precautionary measures to ensure the search warrant was properly executed.” Although the captain did review the search warrant, he admitted he didn’t read it “all the way through,” and that he usually doesn't review the property's description prior to a raid.
For instance, the no-knock warrant described the suspect living at 305 English Road, which had “off white siding” and “a black roof.” In contrast, Norris’ home at 303 English Road (which he had owned for more than half a century) is yellow with a grey roof. Yet despite those clear differences, footage from eight separate body cameras showed the officers all walking past the correct house and heading towards Norris’ home.
Even when officers began raiding Norris’ home, Capt. Cody later testified he “wasn’t sure” this second house was actually their target and just assumed his subordinates “acquired information that justifiably led them to proceed to the second structure.” Those actions, Norris argued, “were not consistent with a reasonable effort to ascertain and identify the place intended to be searched.”
But last month, his civil rights lawsuit was blocked when the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the captain was entitled to qualified immunity. Citing a 2019 ruling where the Eleventh Circuit upheld qualified immunity to a deputy who accidentally shot a 10-year-old while aiming for the family’s dog, the court noted that qualified immunity protects “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.”
With qualified immunity providing such a broad shield, Norris could only prevail if he showed that “Capt. Cody’s actions during the raid—not commanding his team to stop heading towards Norris’s home and then following his team into Norris’s home—violated the law clearly established” in previous decisions.
Because the team had “‘announced’ their presence with flash grenades,” they were “especially limited in their ability to respond,” the court noted, and “our precedent allows some latitude for such ‘honest mistakes...made by officers in the dangerous and difficult process of making arrests and executing search warrants.’” Although the Eleventh Circuit acknowledged that “the mistaken raid of Norris’ home was no doubt traumatic,” it nevertheless held that “Norris failed to meet his burden to show that Capt. Cody violated clearly established law.”
Yet back in 2016, the Eleventh Circuit did deny qualified immunity to a law enforcement officer who was accused of “unlawfully seizing and detaining [the residents] at gunpoint” after he “had entered their home by mistake; he was supposed to execute a search warrant two doors down.” In that decision, the court ruled that the officer violated “clearly established constitutional rights” by failing “to engage in reasonable efforts to avoid erroneously executing the search warrant.”
Unfortunately for Norris, that 2016 decision was unpublished, meaning it's not technically binding, and in the Eleventh Circuit, “we look only to binding precedent to determine clearly established law.” Adding to the Kafkaesque absurdity, the ruling against Norris is also unpublished, meaning that in the Eleventh Circuit, it’s still not “clearly established” that raiding the wrong home at gunpoint is unconstitutional.
Attorneys for both sides did not respond to requests for comment.
