And no, it wasn’t the shoplifter’s home.
Five years ago, police officers in Greenwood Village, Colorado, destroyed a private residence while pursuing a suspected shoplifter who had broken in and barricaded himself inside.Last year a federal court denied the homeowners any compensation for those damages, even though they had no connection to the theft and did not willingly allow the fugitive into their house. This morning the Supreme Court announced that it will not hear the case.
Over the course of June 3 and 4,2015, a SWAT team deployed a series of flash bang grenades, tear gas,40 mm rounds, two Bearcat armored vehicles, and breaching rams against the home of Leo, Alfonsina, and John Lech. The Lechs had to demolish the house, which was worth $580,000. The city gave them $5,000.
This despite the fact that the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment is supposed to protect citizens from having their property taken or destroyed by the government without being justly compensated for that loss.
„The simple rule of the Constitution is that the government cannot arbitrarily single out private citizens to bear the costs of something that should rightly be the burden of society as a whole,“ said attorney Jeffrey Redfern of the Institute for Justice, the public interest law firm that represented the Lechs, in a statement.
