hi john bryan west virginia civil rights lawyer here you may have seen the recent video that came out from the chicago police department search warrant execution into this lady's house where she was naked inside it happened to be the wrong address and it's been going on for it looks like about a year now and there was a federal civil rights lawsuit and finally after some wrangling over whether the body cam footage could be released or not it finally hit the news and there's been a lot of media coverage over it so i thought i'd take a look at the complaint but first take a look at the video and this is the media organization that obtained it and this is an excerpt of the story that they ran on it and while i was undressing in my bedroom it was a cold february night and jeanette young a social worker had just finished her shift at the hospital you see them running up to the apartment complex with the battery ram in their hand crowbar it was so traumatic to hear the way the thing was hitting the door and it happened so fast i didn't have time to put on clothes and suddenly she found herself frozen in fear [Music] then she gets a blanket they just threw something over me and my hands were behind my back and i'm handcuffed so there was no way for me to secure the blanket that they put around me but the blanket just keeps sliding open more humiliation you can see how some officers just stand there until this one wearing a mess sees what's happening and goes and holds it in place so i went ahead and pulled the complaint off of pacer myself and took a look at it and here it is it's filed in illinois in federal court and it names the city of chicago chicago police officers and names all of them this is actually the amended complaint that was that was filed in the case and let's see let's get to the meat of it here basically this happened in february of 2019 and they were looking for this this one guy and they thought based on a confidential informant that he lived at this one address but it in fact was the incorrect address it was actually the home of this lady and jet the plaintiff who lived at that address for over four years so it's a case of mistaken address and what was alleged in this complaint is basically that it was a fourth amendment violation that it was the uh that it was objectively unreasonable for these officers to engage in sloppy police work and not realize that this was the wrong address what you really didn't hear in the media reports and there were a few of them that although they referred to this federal lawsuit pending it's not even pending anymore because the i'm not sure if you want to say that her lawyer screwed it up but he never really served these officers individually and you can't just sue the city of chicago in federal court you have to sue the individuals and you have to serve the individuals and they never even follow the response because they apparently were never served and eventually and really a lackluster ending to what should have been a good case although a difficult case i'll explain why the plaintiff's lawyer filed a motion rather whiningly and complainingly to dismiss his own case and he actually asked the judge to dismiss the federal claims and send his state claims back to state court after which the judge i guess had explained that he can't do that and he all he can do is just dismiss the case and that's what happened so here's the actual plaintiff's motion to dismiss itself and you can see here that he goes through some of the history of when he filed it and what he filed about who the defendants were and then he says he complains about the defense lawyers say the defendants attempt to conflate the plaintiff's allegations and various counts of the complaint while arguing that because the defendants allegedly entered the plaintiff's home pursuant to a valid warrant that such conflation should not be allowed by this court it strains common sense and basic reasoning to suggest that simply because a police officer or group of police officers are initially somewhere that they are allegedly legally allowed to be so that they can't violate the rights of a citizen so allegedly legally allowed that's a tongue twister right there well unfortunately this is really the wrong time for your civil rights lawyer or your lawyer who's new to civil rights to learn that you have to make allegations a certain way in a complaint if you want to get section 1983 federal liability in fact the what you have to argue is if you have a valid search warrant you have to either argue that the search warrant was not a legal search warrant or you have to argue that the search form although legal was exceeded in some way so as to violate the constitution since neither of those things were alleged here they just kind of went went away and dismissed the case i'm not sure what happened to it but it's gone from federal court and it really it should have been a case that that could have been settled given the apparently the city apologizing for it these can be tough claims and i've had them go either way i've i've been able to establish that a warrant was illegal or invalid and therefore fourth amendment violation occurred and then i've lost cases because i was just unable to attack a warrant or in the manner it was executed and if it's just a mistake of and unfortunately qualified immunity is usually going to defeat those cases so you have to allege something more than crappy police work sloppy police work or just a mistaken address you have to really do what's called a frank's claim so the first way uh is attacking the warrant so with the frank's claim and that refers to franks versus delaware 1978 u.s supreme court case that holds that you know if the search warrant is is uh the search is made pursuant to a warrant then you have to attack the warrant to establish that there is an illegal search so false representations or emissions in the warrant application is how you establish fourth amendment violation under section 1983. to succeed basically a defen uh plaintiff uh has to prove that a defendant deliberately or with reckless disregard for the truth made material false statements and the affidavit asking for the warrant which were necessary to the judge's finding of probable cause so you need material facts that were made not just on mistake or sloppily and then crappy police work but with an element of an intent so it has to rise to the level of of being recklessly omitted um so it's a higher standard reckless disregard so there's a has to be a high degree of awareness that this statement that was given to the judge had a high degree of falsity or that the officer had serious doubts as to whether it was true so you have to be very specific in these civil rights cases in federal court on how you allege these things so really after looking at the facts of this case really what they needed to have alleged was that was that it wasn't just sloppy police work but that it was incredible evidence so if it's just a confidential informant that gave you the information there is a requirement that you look to see if that information can be corroborated or verified it could be credible and that really must have that should have been the allegation that they knew that there was this constitutional right to do that or requirement to do that or obligation to do that and that they purposely didn't do that and really is is a pattern of their policies in in chicago which apparently are awful when it comes to search warrants and then you could kind of tie that into a monel claim of of a pattern or practice of this happening that's how i would have done it or the other way of doing this would be to show that all right though we're conceding that this is a valid warrant they executed it in in an unconstitutional way by exceeding the scope of what it allowed now one of the ways that they may have been able to do that though i did haven't seen the warrant itself i didn't see anything about it being a no knock warrant and if you watch that video you'll see that they started busting down the door before they knocked and announced their their presence and there is a constitutional requirement to knock an announce prior to executing a search warrant now they can execute still execute a no knock entry if they got permission ahead of time from the judge because it's you know dangerous you know it has to be sufficiently dangerous and there are cases that describe what that is or or really i should say and there has to be exigent circumstances that they're faced with at the scene that would tell them that you know because it's such a dangerous situation based on some new evidence that they see in front of them could be movement inside or or whatever or the sound of a shotgun racking whatever that that you know reasonably cause them to believe that would be too dangerous to knock an announce and i didn't see that happen here so even if you have nothing else you just allege a count of fourth amendment violation just by virtue of the nomnoc entry and it seems that it could have done that at least here but you know what this is kind of what happens if you if you if you choose a civil rights lawyer that's more of somebody who just likes to get in front of cameras and i'm not sure if that's who this is or not or somebody who's chosen for some other reason other than his experience in this area of the law because this is not something that you want to try by yourself for the first time or learn on the fly with so that's you know sort of the untold story i i see that the technical side of this story and uh you know it's a lot to do is being made in the news about it but when it really comes down to it nothing had happened on on on the legal side maybe it's pending now in state court i don't know what what what uh what's going on there but you know this this is something that should have gone much differently in my opinion in federal court [Music] you