roberts mcafee plaintiffs were here following a jury trial in which the plaintiff was a elderly woman she was asleep in her son's new apartment in which point time members of the chicago police department executed a knock to announce search warrant it was a twenty minute twenty man paramilitary unit with an armored vehicle all in body armor with m four assault rifles the only one in the room and that front room was the plaintiff miss flora windows were broken and in tossed in were least one flash bang grenade following that miss for i suffered serious injuries to her knee at the trial a key piece of evidence excluded and following that trial all she was left with was a note basically saying hey sorry about this horrible case but we did i didn't memorize it that's i didn't mean to mislead the court i know you guys have the exact text in this case the use of this force was per se unreasonable for a variety of reasons first you have to look at the amount of force that was used these flash bang grenades which are regulated by the a t f have unique serial numbers must be signed in and signed out and records must be kept because they are explosive devices burnet two thousand degrees celcius that's like a third of the temperature of the floor of the sun that's where goal becomes liquid those are tossed in and one lands on miss floor noise  prior to using that device the chicago police department officers in question had made no legitimate investigation as to whether there was a threat and there had not looked into that room sufficiently to determine whether there was someone in there whether could have been a grandmother or a three year old plane there was a portion of that room that was completely blind completely blind they could not see into yet that grenade went in there anyway whose decision was it to use lives each officer the original plan had ten officers armed with grenades it called for multiple use of grenades and each officer had the discretion whether to deploy a grenade or not so in this case the evidence showed that at least officer quinn toss in a grenade it was in within his discretion whether do that or not well those i think follow up on judgment and question who made it decision it would they would go in and that type of situation a slot team situation with like thing o that the other defendant defended cold and sent designed the plan question they did he designed the paramilitary group with the use of the grenades and the breaking of the windows to create an additional distraction that would have just given the heavily armed bodily armored individuals an additional two to eight seconds of lag time that's the only benefit whatsoever there was to be used by this use of this dangerous device and considering this i mean it was there was no investigation no sufficient surveillance as to who was in the apartment no sufficient surveillance of hey can we can we look in a mirror can we somehow see who is in the room and it's a small room it was well it it was a routine search warrant i mean for a for street level dime bag deal or in in that situation it's not like there's isis or or a terrorist or or an armed group of thugs in there i mean they didn't they thought that maybe the subject of the search warrant possibly have been armed and that could that one person could have been in there i mean even as a betting man you've got the twenty guys with the m force bottle the armor versus one guy who may be there the use of such an explosive device blindly this is all started by somebody many somebody at the door with a gun or a on start early on at that particular apartment be the john doe indicated that this anthony person did have a gun on a prior occasion but that's all there was there was no searching to who anthony was whether he had been armed what his background was whether there was any individuals of violence and i go back to this court's decision jones that talked about you know the drug trade hate guns or involvement drug trade that's not enough guns or sometimes films have guns that's not enough you know there needs to be some type of investigation into what's going on there needs to be some concern for human life but you know a lot of these are all almost all arguments you made to the jury and the jury came back and threw it against absolutely i mean this is it's not a great obviously it's not a great standard here that being said you force the poor planning and really the failure to explain any of this this is the case with a jury's verdict is against the manifest weight of the evidence i mean this is what you get in every single case every guy they're going after is the worst guy in the world every area in the entire city is a high crime area every every action that they take oh it's reasonable what's interesting is that by their own priority of life safety of civilians should have been number one council to that that leads me to ask if there were there were three i think complaints in this case the original complaint and then it was amended and then i think the third amendment came after mediation perhaps and somewhere along the way and at least one maybe two iterations that complaint there was an elk line and it went away and some of your arguments sound of  the the two defendants that were here where is the officer who planned it in who broke all the windows which would have driven miss flora from the blind spot into directly into the blast zone and the officer who chose to toss a grenade in and you know ideally sure you know be great to see every member of that attack team because we don't know actually know how many grenades were deployed i mean there's no records kept even though the a t f required it saying how many how many worth how many were taken out the rate how many were returned be great to have an alibi great to go after the sergeant but the city defends these cases as a team you push up you push down and that's the way it goes but that's what i'm saying  hearing in some respects you making an argument that the city's policy as it were if this is a policy basically puts the city in a situation where any time police officers go in to execute a warrant on somebody who may be at one point had a gun they're going to show up this way i think i mean i would take that back to judge manuf point as to whose decision it was to deploy the grenade it was off the queen's decision so we get and the fact that they broke the window and they could see into the into the home prior to the grenade being deployed but were too busy yelling police to actually stop the deployment of that grenade shows the flaw in their plan i mean it was it was a it was an accident waiting to happen if you look at that coupled with an ocular now it's i mean it's particularly dangerous i mean the idea is like hey we're not going the door so people will come to the door i'm going to toss a grenade i i mean i understand that the standard is not great for us but looking at all of these things and you look at the discourse decision in milan i mean the milan court head half the swat team that this did they did more investigation and the court still talks about how dangerous these are and what steps the chicago police department must take before using such terrific force beyond that this is not a case where the jury heard all of the key evidence and i'd like to move on to the second point and the exclusion of that report with the handwritten notation that two flash bangs were deployed the primary problem this case is that that exclusion of that document allowed the defendants to use this as both sword in the shield they excluded it primarily under the idea that the authorship could not be determined after they did so they all got up there every single police officer and testified only one grenade had been deployed despite the fact that there were no records despite the fact that they were mandated to keep those rec at that point in time the defense then called miss flora noice own family members who were coming in from jail who were dressed in prison garb and who had them testify to multiple flash bangs being deployed multiple little bombs impeach them with the felony convictions of course and then in closing arguments challenge the jury if you find there's more than one flash bang deployed and you go ahead find what they did was the key piece of evidence was excluded and they ran with that further and further with impunity that official police report was had a handwritten note bottom it said to flash bangs the ploy it was obviously with someone from knowledge of that raid that document that notation must have been made either by a chicago police department employee or it was received by or from the cook county state's attorney's office that there are no hearsay exceptions that cover i hear of those conditions that you just raised the fact it was received from someone with knowledge of received by somebody you get the record not important to look at the relationship between the state's attorney's office and the chicago police department in that instance the chicago police department go to the state's attorney's office for the very warrant they seek to execute after that one is executed the chicago police department works hand in hand with the cook county state's attorney's office in order to prosecute the case the quite the form in question came to the plaintiff from defendants when they tendered it after receiving it from the cook county state's attorney's file there's certainly an agency type relationship and certainly a law enforcement relationship where both parties want to work together to reach the same that you're arguing then that the type signed form is a record of regularly conducted business and therefore an exception to the hearsay rule but what you're what what i understand you to be claiming in the very is not that you wanted the police report in its that you wanted that handwritten notation in right one of both that we wanted the the police report also with the handwritten notation as either the bulk of it a business record  possibly a business record from the state's attorney's office as it came from them from their file maintained in their file or under the residual exception it talks about the guarantees of trustworthiness considering both of these agencies were law enforcement agencies they all concerned this particular type of knowledge all these factors gave it circumstantial evidence or trustworthiness the statement that two flash bangs are employed which is written by a person whom you can't identify at a time that you don't know what are the in disha of her liability that make that innocent all that that handwritten notation judge i would say it's the details nature of it the the fact that  must have been from someone who had knowledge of the raid it's corroborated by the civilian witnesses called by the defense the members the floor my family it comes from a source that is reliable in the sense that it's a prosecuting agency dealing with this and official public agency that's required to uphold the law those factors are the most important give circumstantial guarantees of trustworthiness i would also say on the flip side there's certainly something that says it should go to the weight of the evidence rather than just its myth admissibility and go back to fact that the record keeping in this case was abysmal to the point of being intentionally slipshod when you went every regulation says a t f requires you you must sign each out each one of these you must record the serial number on each one of these you must return a month each one of these and the chicago police department comes back and says we got nothing no records about how many grenades were used whether turned in or turned out you know the thing is about the lack of the author it would be great his deposition that the he thought that the two flash bang grenades deployed writing was out of his partner officer quinn one of their friend it's officer coleman said when the defendant's or that his partner officer brown so there was some indication with it we should have been on sorry i see my time is for him of one thing there was one copy without any writing on it right correct which indicates to me at least copies of that there's always one copy but as it's not that there's one official copy well i know one original it's it's this is the problem if it's a clean copy to start somebody there is with no wri original and somebody can write off that's the problem because if there's an original that it recites in it there was one used then somebody writes on something else that's when we don't know who it is right well  at i agree that that could be an indication but it could of what we're saying is because of what's written it had to have been someone from the rate someone who was there and have to be somebody got hold of a subsequent copy that's but it could be grenade hit her there judge i could not answer that question i know that there's one blast if you look at the photos in the appendix there's clearly one black blast site and but it must have landed said there is some admission if there were to be different cases that jurors raising i would say would make our case even stronger judge and would also show that every one of these defendants came in here and deliberately lied and to show you know more of a motive to conceal things because it just i just had one question sorry slightly different you said they came in your witnesses that's when a family came in prison garb testified all right yes yes what we didn't call it was a defens peace the court district court soundly exercised its discretion in denying a motion for a new trial because the verdict was not against the manifest weight of the evidence the jury heard testimony that officers called and soon in alternatively at a minimum they are entitled to qualified immunity additionally the exclusion of the copy of officer coincidence report that includes the century notation does not entitle miss one of the two a new trial and with case answered the door holding a semiautomatic handgun based on that information officer little bianco determined that was the officer who obtained the search warrant he determined that this search presented a high degree of risk it was too dangerous for high risk search warrant services they in their own judgment determined that it did present high degree of risk and on that basis they approved the request counsel given that we're in the city of chicago the definition that you just game wouldn't that render rather a significant percentage of the arrest warrant executions in the city to be high risk situations it's possible you're honoring and in terms of the broader statistics in terms of how frequently the swat team is deployed to execute search warrants there was numbers aren't in this case however to the extent that historically takes issue with how often quinn the determination had already been made that this wasn't fact a high risk search warrant been tasked with executing that warrant officer called unsupervised this mission a plan that authorized the use of flash bang grenades as well as the breaking of windows and in light of all that the dangerous situation that was determined by these officers superiors and the facts that came into the trial that explained  copy of the report that includes the handwritten notation that copy of the report is completely untrustworthy in that version of this report with sent to the state's attorney's office a private proximately seven months after the stated clearly that the fact to work but instead this handwritten notation contradicts what has been typed in for that reason it was completely trustworthy counsel can i go back to your argument that th officer's actions here were reasonable the description that the sense that one gets from reading the facts at both those parties that's a fact i think you've got twenty guys in body armor with weapons a battering ram surrounding an apartment it sounds like there's noise going on there people yelling police somebody knocks a couple seconds later and goes the door crash goes the window glass going everywhere and then this device gets thrown in it's hard for me just imagining that scenario to imagine that somebody who's asleep guard officer quinn testified that his role in executing this warrant with to look inside the doorway and look at this at the place where he intended to deploy that device which was a few feet inside the apartment and if that was clear that area was clear that he was going to deploy the device but you go the other parts of your question in terms of the other it be additional concerns in this case those are all perfectly appropriate concerts and they all went in to the jury and the ram and then someone goes in with a shield and then behind that person somebody obs in the grenade and of course and he looks around and sees whatever you can see past the shield i guess and then that in and then we don't know what the condition of the plaintiff was before she either rolled or something off of this mattress i can't tell by the picture where she was moved yet seem to be shuffled around and it's awful it's not you know it's bad thing that happened and certainly i mean the other cases he said i've seen there's that nobody was injured by one of these things it is true it has this congestion supposed to be a surprise and supposed to cause everyone to to be disarmed or not disarmed but it's much is they don't know what to do run around and sort of say your little fires a period already we used to call in the military it's a long time ago for me but know the words it's that's how you get the element in there and it works this wind caused serious damage it did and where there's even only one of you that's what appears to be and i can't tell how someone either falls maybe she rolled off this mattress with all the noise or something and the area inside the apartment where he deployed the device and it was clear there was no one there the windows were broken sort of concurrently with the grenade concurrently with the door being open door to door scratched open then the your writing statement the jury saying that it's a terrible thing but they don't want to put it on just those two guys because this was a command decision of some kind and that therefore even though those are the maybe the military might be the point man people out front that are doing the first shooting or whatever as opposed to who makes the decision to have that plan of attack and we don't know who did that leave he said that he was one of the players one of the defendants that right by the time the defendants in this case got involved in the search warrant it already been determined that this was a high risk search warrant that m references errors of the chicago police department as a whole that's that's all we have in the record and who are the original defendants in this case i believe well the city was originally a defendant with room one of clay and one of the supervisors i you're just saying to the level police officer and not the city at least as far as you're this litigation's yes yes certainly and there was no argument to the jury was there that someone directed quinn to use the flash unit was responsible for entering that front door and he was his assignment within that teen was to be the person to deploy the device if the coast was clear and the mission plan said what about when to use a flash  in terms of the timing it didn't specifically i'm sorry under what circumstance not necessarily time but under what circumstances to the mission plans it would be appropriate to use a flash when the mission plan didn't address that issue specifically it authorized the use of them and the officers testified about their training and in what situations they were to not use these devices so when you went to trial here you didn't have the command people perfectly reconcilable with the verdict in favor of these two individuals and that's one fact might also my question is there was no indication in any oh i'm sure we've heard of any indication of the city was originally a party may have been a settlement with regard to the city and so forth know that there was no there consistent with this verdict in favor of these two individual officers in that the jury apparently determined that the chicago police department as a whole made errors but the jury wasn't asked to consider the context of the church the chicago police department as a whole it was only asked to consider whether these individual officers were personally responsible for what happened in this forum and so whatever errors the department as a whole commit that can't be attributed to these individual officers