78-Year-Old Black Woman Ruby Johnson Wins $3.8 Million Judgment After SWAT Team Searched Wrong Home

The owner of the stolen truck with the iPhone inside mistakenly tracked the phone to Johnson’s home using the Find My app and passed the data to police.

DENVER (AP) — A 78-year-old woman who sued two law enforcement officials after a SWAT team trying to find a stolen truck mistakenly searched her home has won a $3.76 million jury verdict under a brand new Colorado law that enables people to sue the police for violating their state constitutional rights.

Late Friday, a jury in state court in Denver ruled in favor of Ruby Johnson, and on Monday the decision was announced by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which helped represent her within the lawsuit. The lawsuit alleged that police served a search warrant at the house after the owner of the stolen truck, which contained 4 semi-automatic handguns, a rifle, a revolver, two drones, $4,000 in money and an iPhone, tracked the phone to Johnson’s home. using the Find My app and passed this information on to the police.

According to the lawsuit, Johnson, a retired U.S. Postal Service worker and grandmother, had just stepped out of the shower on Jan. 4, 2022, when she heard an order over a bullhorn for everybody inside to get out with their hands up. Wearing only a bathrobe, she opened the front door to see an armored personnel carrier parked on the front lawn, police vehicles lining the road, and men in full military gear carrying rifles and a police dog.

According to the lawsuit, Detective Gary Staab wrongfully obtained a search warrant for Johnson’s home because he did not indicate that the data on the app was imprecise and only showed a general location where the phone is perhaps situated.

Staab’s lawyers and the supervisor who approved the search warrant, Sgt. Gregory Buschy, who was also sued, didn’t reply to emails and phone calls searching for comment. The Denver Police Department, which was not sued, declined to comment on the decision.

The lawsuit was brought under a provision of the Major Police Reform Act passed in 2020 shortly after George Floyd’s murder and is the primary significant case to go to trial, the ACLU of Colorado said. State lawmakers created the appropriate to sue individual law enforcement officials for state constitutional violations in state court. Previously, people alleging police misconduct could only file lawsuits in federal court, where pursuing such cases has turn into difficult, partly, due to a legal doctrine generally known as qualified immunity. It protects officials, including police, from lawsuits for money arising from what they do in the middle of their work.

Police used a battering ram to get into Johnson’s garage, though she explained easy methods to open the door and broke ceiling tiles to get to the attic, in accordance with the lawsuit. She stood on considered one of her brand latest dining room chairs. They also broke off the top of a doll made to look similar to her, together with the glasses, ACLU of Colorado legal director Tim Macdonald said.

Johnson is black, however the lawsuit doesn’t allege that race plays a job, he added.

Macdonald said the best damage was done to Johnson’s sense of security in the house where she raised her three children alone, temporarily giving up Christmas and birthday gifts to have the option to afford them. She suffered from ulcers and had trouble sleeping, so she eventually moved to a different neighborhood.

“In our case, the harm was always about the mental and emotional harm caused to Ms. Johnson,” he said.

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78-Year-Old Black Woman Ruby Johnson Wins $3.8 Million Judgment After SWAT Team Searches Wrong Home appeared first on TheGrio.