Texas SWAT Team Held Innocent Family at Gunpoint After Raiding the Wrong Home
The officers are avoiding accountability after getting qualified immunity.
A Texas SWAT Team raided an innocent family's house in 2019, barging into the family's home and holding them at gunpoint before realizing they were at the wrong address. But when the family sued, officers were granted qualified immunity.
In a request for additional review filed earlier this month, the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a civil liberties law firm, seeks to challenge that, arguing that police had more than enough opportunities to know they were raiding the wrong home.
On an evening in March 2019, a Waxahachie, Texas, SWAT Team, led by Lt. Mike Lewis, burst into Karen Jimerson and James Parks' home. According to legal documents, "Lewis ordered his SWAT team to 'break and rake'" the family's home, "smashing through windows, detonating a flashbang grenade, and kicking down the door with guns drawn."
After causing considerable damage to the family's home, police held them at gunpoint, including the couple's three children. But the officers didn't have a warrant for a no-knock raid on the family's house. Instead, their next-door neighbor was the intended target.
It shouldn't have been difficult to tell which home the officers were supposed to raid—there were major differences in the neighboring houses' appearance. The house police had obtained a warrant for was surrounded by a chain link fence, had a detached garage, and a front porch, and had its address painted to the curb and onto a pole holding up the porch. In contrast, Jimerson and Parks' home had no porch, no detached garage, no fence, and a huge wheelchair ramp leading to the home's front door.
Karen Jimerson sued Lewis in 2020, arguing that his actions violated her family's Fourth Amendment rights. After a lengthy legal battle, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals granted Lewis qualified immunity on appeal, ruling that because he did more than "nothing" to verify that he had the correct house, he was entitled to immunity.
The three-judge panel found, "If an officer takes some steps to identify the correct house before executing the warrant, he is entitled to qualified immunity," I.J. summarized, "even if he fails to employ the information learned in taking these steps."
However, according to I.J., the steps Lewis took to verify the correct address were minimal—"reviewing the warrant, searching a website, speaking with DEA agents, and briefly looking at the Jimersons' house before ordering officers to storm it"—and nearly all occurred before he arrived at the scene of the raid.
"Lewis's decision to order the raid was obviously unconstitutional," I.J. wrote in a document requesting that the case be heard by the full slate of 5th Circuit judges. "All adults know they cannot waltz into a stranger's house without confirming it's the one they have permission to enter."
This case is far from the first time police have barged into the wrong address with disastrous consequences. In 2022, other Texas cops held an innocent couple at gunpoint after raiding the wrong house. In 2018, police in Bexar County, Texas, burst into the wrong address while conducting a no-knock drug raid—and kept searching the home, even after they realized their mistake. Beyond Texas, a 2023 report found that Chicago cops accidentally raided the wrong house almost two dozen times between 2017 and 2020.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
even if he fails to employ the information learned in taking these steps.
I knew it was wrong, had time to correct and did it anyway; is usually grounds for a 1st degree felony, no?
Not when you have Gov-Guns. Then it’s just in a day’s work.
>>But when the family sued
other than the door frame, what damages?
Lewis ordered his SWAT team to ‘break and rake'” the family’s home, “smashing through windows, detonating a flashbang grenade, and kicking down the door with guns drawn.”
other than property damage, what are the damages?
It’s difficult to put into words, so perhaps to better understand that, someone should break into your house and hold you and your children at gunpoint for a while.
okay, but you’d never make it past jury selection. “fear! pay me!” is not a damage model
If you aren’t a cop, pointing a gun at someone without good reason will get you charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
In what free country is a “raid” something that the people would allow the government to do to them? That’s something that pillagers do.
There are no free countries.
But the officers didn’t have a warrant for a no-knock raid on the family’s house. Instead, their next-door neighbor was the intended target.
So the Waxahachie SWAT Team is recruiting from DoorDash now?
Was gonna say, they must be trained in address locating by the USPS.
But when the family sued, officers were granted qualified immunity.
If I ventilate the first three home invaders, do I get any kind of immunity?
No, you get riddled to death like Scarface because in no uncertain terms are they going to not fill every inch of that house with lead … reloading several times in the process.
Have you seen the third season of “True detective “? I mean, the guy dies, after killing about 20 people.
So presidential immunity is not that far fetched.
As long as there is “qualified immunity”, there will continue to be little concern as to whether or not a serious mistake is being made.
Qualified immunity means cops are not held accountable. According to Pierson v. Ray immunity is in our law because, well because it’s always been there, Kings enjoyed it and why shouldn’t judges, politicians & cops? Cops should be held to a higher standard, not lower.
You really need to stop writing these stories, Emma. Because you suck at them. It’s like you put in ZERO effort to learn ANYTHING about any aspect of it before you start rattling off your canned narrative garbage.
First – understand that Plaintiff’s lawyers (the IJ) offered no meaningful legal argument for their position. This is key: “Here, the plaintiffs have not cited authority demonstrating that Lewis’s conduct violated clearly established law.”
Second, this is grossly misleading:
However, according to I.J., the steps Lewis took to verify the correct address were minimal
And according to THE COURT, quote, “Lewis was far more careful than the officers in the two opinions cited to us as showing he violated clearly established law.”
So, when Emma complains about the actions by the cops (citing IJ’s claim), it’s basically Monday Morning Quarterbacking. But more importantly, it’s not even MMQ’ing the correct issue.
The IJ argued a certain standard for measuring such things based on weak caselaw they used to establish said standard. THEY set the bar. And the Court came back at them and said, effectively, “Then by the standard YOU set here, your case clearly doesn’t hold water.”
So… I mean, what’s your argument here? That the judges should have made the Plaintiff’s case for them? Like, sua sponte or something?
What’s truly amazing about this article though is that at no point does Emma realize that the IJ and the case they presented is to blame for this result. Instead she just mindless parrots the IJ’s failed legal argument.
And here’s the thing – their might not actually BE caselaw that supports the IJ’s position. Giving IJ the benefit of the doubt as to their competency and thoroughness, maybe they were trying to argue a standard that genuinely doesn’t exist. In which case, this article quickly reduces to, “Well I just don’t like the law.” *eyeroll*
Meaning that, instead of chasing after a paycheck via tort judgment from the Court; what they SHOULD have been doing is investigating the weakness of the qualified immunity standards and petitioning the Legislature for better laws.
You’re upset at all the wrong people, Emma. By a generous take, the IJ took this up with the wrong branch of government. By a less generous take, they phoned in their case. You should be pointing the finger at them.
But you don’t care. You just vomit up the clickbait headline and then recite a one-sided narrative on a subject you learned nothing about.
Do you really think anyone’s going to pay to read this tripe when you go R+?