Officers Entered a Hartford Yard Without a Warrant and Killed Seven. The City Then Refused to Pay.

In December 2006, a Saint Bernard named Seven was playing in the backyard of Glen Harris's home in Hartford with Harris's 12-year-old daughter. Two Hartford police officers walked onto the property that day, the Associated Press reported, after a report that two guns were inside an abandoned car there — a report the AP said turned out to be false.

Seven ran at the officers, according to the AP's account, and one of them shot the dog. Seven died. No guns were found on the property.

Only one news organisation's reporting on this shooting could be located: an Associated Press story by Dave Collins, published Sept. 11, 2016, and carried by the Portland Press Herald. No independent account was found. For that reason this record does not name the officers, though the AP does, and every contested detail below is set out as the AP reported it. One account is not enough to attach an individual's name to a shooting.

Harris sued the city and the two officers, alleging illegal search and seizure, violation of constitutional rights and emotional distress. A jury cleared the city and the officers on all counts.

The warrantless entry

In October 2014, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that verdict, holding that the officers should not have entered the property without a warrant, and ordered a trial to determine damages. Lawyers for the city and the officers, the appeals court said, had "overvalued" Hartford's high crime rate as an "exigent circumstances" justification for entering the yard. That reasoning reaches past one backyard: it refuses the premise that the crime statistics of a neighbourhood lower the constitutional threshold for walking uninvited into the yards of the people who live in it.

By the time the damages trial approached, nearly a decade after Seven was killed, the open question was no longer whether the search was lawful. It was who would pay for it.

Lawyers for the city had said earlier in 2016, in court documents, that state law required Hartford to indemnify the two officers. In September 2016, the AP reported, the city reversed that position: Harris's lawyer, Jon Schoenhorn, wrote in a court filing that the city now believed it was not obligated to indemnify them, and the city's insurer had told the city it would not cover any damage award. That left the officers potentially liable personally — and left the Harris family, as the AP put it, with the prospect of trouble collecting anything at all.

"They (the city) spend all this money and time defending them and they say you're on your own now," Sgt. Richard Holton, president of the Hartford Police Union, told the AP. "You hate to see your members go through something like this and be hung out to dry."

Jury selection was set to begin the following Tuesday in federal court in Hartford, with the damages trial scheduled for Sept. 19, 2016. The AP's reporting records no discipline against either officer; both were sergeants as of 2016, the AP said. Ten years after a family dog was shot in a yard two officers had no warrant to enter, the only accountability on the record was an appellate ruling that the entry was unlawful — and a city arguing it owed the family nothing.