A bit on SWAT team damage liability law. Radley Balko of CATO...
¦ There is no possibility that the federal courts, at least as presently constituted, will meaningfully protect citizens from SWAT team excesses. Indeed, stacked as they are with right-wing, pro-state majoritarians, many of them ex-prosecutors or ex-government lawyers, these courts have been downright hostile to most claims that police conduct violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Although constitutional law, statutory law, and the common law generally prohibit no-knock entries into residences by police executing a search warrant and require them instead to afford the residents an opportunity to open the door peacefully, the knock-and-announce requirement has been so watered down and so riddled with exceptions by the federal courts that it is now virtually meaningless. (In U.S. v. Banks, 540 U.S. 31 (2003), for example, the U.S. Supreme Court held that police did not violate the knock-and-announce requirement when they waited only 15 to 20 seconds after knocking before forcibly entering the defendant’s two-room apartment to execute a search warrant.) The traditional legal requirement that police usually afford the inhabitants of a home an opportunity to answer the knock at the door before police violently enter has become, therefore, in the words of legal scholar E. Martin Estrada, “a toothless tiger in the constitutional jungle.” As a result, the great majority of warrant-based home searches, especially those made by SWAT units, involve no-knock entry. Such entry, which is supposed to be the exception, has become the rule. Compounding the problem, on June 15 of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court, which tragically nowadays is unperturbed by lawlessness in law enforcement and views itself as a footsoldier in the war on drugs and crime and a cheerleader for the police rather than a guardian of the basic rights of Americans, startlingly overruled precedents and held by a 5-4 vote in Hudson v. Michigan, 126 S.Ct. 2159 (2006), that when police do violate the Fourth Amendment in effecting no-knock entry into a home to serve a search warrant, the evidence obtained inside will no longer be inadmissible in court. In his creepily pro-government opinion for the majority, Justice Scalia sank so low as to label a clear Fourth Amendment violation and police state-type outrage–police bursting into a residence in violation of the ban on no-knock entry–as “a preliminary misstep”! Furthermore, technical and procedural rules erected by the U.S. Supreme Court have made it very difficult and time-consuming to sue the police successfully for violating citizens’ rights. Federal civil actions for damages against SWAT officers are therefore usually unsuccessful, and the majority of such actions are dismissed prior to trial.
¦ Criminal prosecutions of SWAT officers who exceed their lawful powers in the use of deadly or nondeadly force are extremely rare, and convictions of such officers are practically unheard of. Fairfax county, Virginia prosecutors, for example, declined to bring charges against the officer who killed Dr. Culosi even though tests showed no defect in the officer’s handgun.
Guess the county put all ethical and moral considerations aside and just simply will not take any step which could be seen as them accepting any liability which would go against them in any later civil suit.
This might have some relevance, too.
11. Sovereign and Governmental Immunity has been around for a long time
In North Carolina sovereign immunity applies to the state, while governmental immunity applies to local governments. They are different but related:
Governmental immunity is immunity from tort liability only and is based not on sovereign immunity and the “king can do no wrong” concept but instead is based on the policy decision that governmental agencies should not have to pay money damages.
Here's a primer on local government liability in North Carolina .. http://goo.gl/0XtlTI - don't know about laws in other states.
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