SCOTUS NEWS
by Amy Howe
on 25 November 2024
at 10:49
The judges did not add any cases to their dockets Monday. (Katie Barlow)
The Supreme Court declined Monday morning to hear the case of a Texas woman seeking damages for damages to her home caused by a SWAT team pursuing a fugitive. The refusal of review i Baker v. McKinney came on a list of orders from the justices’ private conference Friday.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, issued a statement about the court’s decision not to take up the case. She noted that the woman’s case presented an “important issue that has divided the appellate courts.”
After adding two new cases involving challenges to the constitutionality of parts of a Federal Communications Commission program to improve Internet and telephone service in underserved areas, the justices did not grant any additional cases Monday.
The justices once again did not act on several high-profile petitions for review involving issues such as the constitutionality of the admissions program for three of Boston’s elite public high schools, challenges to bans by Idaho and West Virginia against the participation of transgender girls and women on women’s sports teams, and a challenge to a Wisconsin school district to provide support for transgender and non-binary students. They will meet again to consider new petitions for review on Friday 6 December.
Police responded to Vicki Baker’s house in McKinney, Tex., when they found an armed fugitive holding a 15-year-old girl inside. After the fugitive released the girl, a SWAT team used (among other things) explosive devices, poison gas shells, and an armored personnel carrier to try to subdue him and regain control of the situation. The fugitive had died by suicide, but the SWAT team caused extensive damage to the home, which was not covered by Baker’s homeowner’s insurance.
Baker sued the city in federal court, arguing that the willful destruction of her property violated the Constitution’s Takings Clause, which prevents the government from taking private property for public use without paying just compensation. The district court awarded Baker $44,555 for damages to her home, as well as $15,100 for damages to her possessions.
The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that decision, and the appeals court declined to reconsider the reversal. While expressing “sympathy” for Baker, “on whom the accident befell through no fault of her own,” the appeals court reasoned that “as a matter of history and precedent, the Takings Clause does not require compensation for damaged or destroyed property when it was objectively necessary for officers to damage or destroy that property in an active emergency to prevent imminent harm to persons.”
Baker came to the Supreme Court in June and asked the justices to take up her case. But after considering her petition for review at four consecutive conferences, the court denied her.
In a statement spanning just over five pages, Sotomayor emphasized that the denial of review “expresses no opinion on the merits of” the 5th Circuit’s decision. She explained that relatively few appeals courts have considered whether and to what extent the Takings Clause “applies to the exercise” of the government’s police power. And most of those that have, she noted, issued their decisions before the 5th Circuit’s decision in this case “that there is an ‘objectively necessary’ exception to the Takings Clause.” It would be better, she concluded, for more federal appeals courts to consider this “important and complex issue” before the Supreme Court steps in.
The judges also called for the federal government’s views in two cases involving liability for copyright infringement over the Internet. There is no deadline for the government to submit its comments in the two related cases, Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment v. Cox Communications.
This article was originally published on Howe on the Court.