Late Friday afternoon, a United States District Court jury hit the Pima County Sheriff with a $1,250,000.00 verdict for a May 23, 2013 home invasion in Pima County. A Pima County couple were awoken from sleep to the sound of banging and screaming outside their home. When they came to the door, both were seized by several Pima County Sheriff deputies, handcuffed, and marched out to a cruiser on the side of the road. Husband and wife were both barefoot. While the couple was held at the cruiser in full view of their neighbors, three other deputies entered and searched their home.
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The search was halted when the 911 caller who had brought the deputies to the general area, told one deputy that they had the wrong house. The caller had claimed to have heard a violent confrontation and gunfire, but never gave a description of the participants. The couple was still held while the deputies advanced on the second home in the same SWAT-type raid they had done at the couple’s home.
During the case, Michael Garth Moore, the couple’s attorney, presented numerous reports from the Sheriff’s database that revealed the caller to have repeatedly made 911 calls which were false. The caller only days before had been transported by other deputies to a mental health crisis center after reporting he was being targeted by laser beams and hearing voices in his head.
It was not until after the second family, the Jacksons, were seized and their home searched and nothing found that the Sheriff checked the database and called the operation off.
The jury found that the couple’s rights to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment had been violated. The trial was presided over by Senior District Judge David C. Bury.