Looks like law enforcement officers can be held personally responsible when they mess up and violate someone’s constitutional rights:

A divided Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a federal agent can be sued for violating the constitutional rights of a couple during a search of their ranch, refusing to shield officers from personal liability when they make mistakes on search warrants.

The court, on a 5-4 vote, said that a mistake in the paperwork for a 1997 search in rural Montana was serious enough to allow a lawsuit against the officer who led a team of people on a fruitless hunt for illegal automatic weapons.

Officers are ordinarily immune from lawsuits over their conduct on duty, but the high court has made exceptions when they violate someone’s constitutional rights.

“It is incumbent on the officer executing a search warrant to ensure the search is lawfully authorized and lawfully conducted,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the decision. “Even a cursory reading of the warrant in this case – perhaps just a simple glance – would have revealed a glaring deficiency that any reasonable police officer would have known was constitutionally fatal.”

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Agent Jeff Groh went to the ranch of Joseph and Julia Ramirez armed with a search warrant that did not list any items officers were searching for, Stevens said.

The four justices in dissent said he should have been forgiven the clerical mistake.

I’m sorry, but we can’t excuse clerical errors when it comes to someone’s civil liberties. Otherwise, every violation would suddenly involve a clerical error.

Posted in uncategorized on February 24th, 2004 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |