ATLANTA — A botched FBI raid on a suburban Atlanta home has led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision against the government in a lawsuit brought by the victims.

In October 2017, a six-member SWAT team rammed the door of “a quiet family home” and tossed in a flash-bang grenade. The raiding party had relied on a GPS device to locate a suspected gang hideout, failing to notice the address on the mailbox. The agents had mistakenly entered the home of Hilliard Toi Cliatt, his partner Curtrina Martin, and her 7-year-old son Gabe.

They sued the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld a district judge’s decision in favor of the government, which had claimed sovereign immunity.

The Supreme Court’s decision Thursday revives the residents’ lawsuit, returning it to the courts in Atlanta.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the decision for the unanimous ruling, summed up the question at hand: “If federal officers raid the wrong house, causing property damage and assaulting innocent occupants, may the homeowners sue the government for damages? The answer is not as obvious as it might be.”

A tort is a wrongful act that causes harm or injury and is subject to monetary damages and other legal remedies. Sovereign immunity generally shields government from tort lawsuits, but that shield can be penetrated, sometimes in the case of “wrong-house” raids, Gorsuch wrote.

It is a complicated area of law, based on legal precedents that go back to the late 1800s with a sordid affair involving a former state supreme court justice in California who was shot dead by a federal marshal. The marshal, a former Tombstone, Ariz., police chief, was protecting a U.S. Supreme Court justice but was arrested by California authorities.

He convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to free him, the high court reasoning that allowing states to prosecute marshals for acts in the line of duty would “frustrate” federal law.

The 11th Circuit’s decision for the government reflected that history, but the U.S. Supreme Court justices concurred that the Atlanta circuit had issued an “outlier” opinion at odds with how most other courts have ruled on tort and sovereign immunity in such cases.

Georgia law allows a homeowner to sue a private person for damages in the event of a house raid and assault, and the high court determined that the 11th Circuit had improperly relied on cases such as that one from the 1800s, adding, “the 11th Circuit did not identify any federal statute or constitutional provision displacing Georgia tort law.”

The Institute for Justice, which represented the plaintiffs, said the decision explains that federal tort law “allows people to sue the federal government when its agents violate individual rights — intentionally or by accident.”