OLYMPIA, Wash. (Legal Newsline) – The Washington Supreme Court has reinstated a verdict in favor of a nurse who was awakened by cops and forced to wait outside in her nightgown while they searched her apartment instead of the one they were supposed to.
The court’s Jan. 28 decision overturns an intermediate court of appeals ruling and costs the City of Tacoma a $250,000 verdict in the case of Kathleen Mancini.
She was awakened on Jan. 5, 2011, at 9:45 a.m. after working the night before by cops with a battering ram looking for Matthew Logstrom. As the decision explains, the officers expected to find a young drug dealer living in a “somewhat unkempt” apartment but instead barged in on Mancini’s well-kept home.
They handcuffed her and made her wait outside without shoes while they searched her apartment. She sued them for negligence.
The Supreme Court said Tacoma can’t use sovereign immunity to escape the charges because the standard duty of reasonable care applies to police executing a search warrant.
“At trial, Mancini introduced evidence that the police raided her apartment, pointed guns at her, forced her to the ground, handcuffed her, took her outside barefoot in a nightgown, in January, and left her handcuffed for up to 15 minutes,” Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud wrote.
“She also presented contrasting evidence of the peaceful manner by which police contacted Logstrom’s actual apartment, despite justifying their initial raid by rating Logstrom a potentially armed ‘medium threat.’”
The evidence presented offered the jury multiple avenues to find the police breached their duty of care, the opinion says.
“A rational juror could have found that police breached the door unreasonably quickly after knocking and receiving no response, that police took an unreasonable amount of time to realize they had the wrong apartment, that the police unreasonably continued their search of Mancini’s apartment after realizing they had hit the wrong door, or that the police unreasonably left Mancini handcuffed long after realizing she had no relation to their suspect—or any combination of these facts," Gordon McCloud wrote.