L.A. County v. Rettele

In L.A. County v. Rettele, 127 S. Ct. 1989 (2007), the U.S. Supreme Court in a per curiam decision on a petition for certioriari reversed the Ninth Circuit and held that it was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment for police to invade a house and order a couple to stand naked for several minutes while the police checked for weapons. This was allowed even though the couple was Caucasian and the suspects leading to the raid were African American. The police had failed to checked the ownership records of the house, where they would have found that the suspects had sold it to innocent buyers months before the raid. Moreover, and emergency raid was not justified by the suspected crime anyway.

The couple victimized by the raid had complained that the search was conducted in an unreasonable manner, and had sued under Section 1983.