After police in suburban Ft. Worth shot Charlene Leatherman’s dogs to death during a mistaken drug search and then sat on her lawn drinking beer, she sued the officers for violating her civil rights.
Gerald Andert did the same after an officer in another suburb gashed his head with a flashlight just after his wife had died.
But federal courts threw out both lawsuits for not being specific enough in the wording of their complaints.
On Wednesday, a unanimous Supreme Court reinstated the suits in a ruling that is likely to make it easier for citizens to get into court on complaints of misconduct by police and city officials.
Voting 9-0, the justices said federal courts cannot set stricter requirements for people suing municipalities for civil rights violations than for people filing other kinds of lawsuits.
Although federal rules require most suits to contain only a “short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief,” some federal courts, including the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, require more detail in civil rights cases.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the court, said such a restriction is unwarranted.
The court rejected arguments by municipal officials that a less-stringent requirement would force local governments to engage in expensive and time-consuming litigation preparation and would disrupt city functions.
“This argument wrongly equates freedom from liability with immunity from suit,” Rehnquist wrote.
Under a 1978 Supreme Court ruling, cities and towns can be ordered to pay damages only if their employees violate individual rights while following a governmental policy or custom. While many claims against municipalities do not meet that standard, Wednesday’s decision means they at least will get into court.
Rehnquist said municipalities still have ways of weeding out frivolous claims before they get to trial.
The ruling did not deal with suits against individual officers or municipal officials.
Leatherman and Andert essentially complained that officers who raided their homes were improperly trained, but the lower courts said the lawsuits did not properly state that claim.
Andert contends that Tarrant County drug police burst into his Southlake home without warning one evening in January 1989 while his family gathered to mourn his wife, who had died from cancer two days before.
One officer hit Andert in the head twice with a flashlight, leaving a cut that required 11 stitches. Family members were forced to lie on the floor while officers searched the house for more than an hour. The officers found no drugs.
The police dispute Andert’s claim that officers did not identify themselves. They also contend that the search was warranted because they smelled gases associated with amphetamine preparation outside the house and because Andert’s son-in-law, who lived at the house, had an extensive criminal record.
Leatherman’s Lake Worth house was searched in May 1989 while she, her husband and son were out. When she and her son returned home, they found one of their dogs fatally shot near the door and the other lying in a pool of blood on a bed, apparently shot at close range with a shotgun. After the search yielded no drugs, officers lounged on the front lawn for 90 minutes “drinking beer, smoking, talking, laughing,” the Leathermans’ appeal said.
The Leathermans and the Anderts sued the Tarrant County Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination Unit, which was involved in both cases, plus the Cities of Lake Worth and Grapevine, both Ft. Worth suburbs.
