What legal action can the family of Renee Macklin Good take? A lawyer explains.

Renee Macklin Good's parents, siblings and widow have hired the same law firm that represented the family of George Floyd. Their civil attorney Antonio Romanucci said his firm is launching a civil investigation into Good’s death after she was shot and killed by an ICE agent in south Minneapolis last week.

Lauren Bonds is the executive director of the National Police Accountability Project. She joined MPR News host Nina Moini to talk about what the family's legal path could look like.

The following has been edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. 

Renee Macklin Good's family’s lawyers are independently investigating her death. How common is it to take that route?

It actually is a fairly common route to take, even if someone else is in power in the federal government or the state government. So what the Good family’s attorneys are trying to do here is set up a private civil rights case that would either be a Bivens action against agent Ross or it would be a Federal Tort Claims Act action against the federal government itself. This is pretty common for them, and they'll have different elements of proof than, say, a criminal case.

How challenging is it to pursue a lawsuit against a federal agent that has killed someone?

It's incredibly challenging. The primary route to pursue a civil case against an individual officer is that Bivens action that I mentioned, and so Bivens is a right of action that the Supreme Court recognized back in 1971 in a case called Bivens. And it's a way to sue federal agents for constitutional violations. Since the case was first decided, the Supreme Court has narrowed the types of claims that a plaintiff can bring when they're harmed by a federal law enforcement officer. And in 2022 the Supreme Court decided in a case called Egbert v. Boule, and that case essentially, shut the door on a number of constitutional claims. Potentially it would shut the door on Fourth Amendment excessive force claims, which would be what the family would be trying to prove and sue for here.

So it's always been difficult, but it's a much narrower path than it has ever been before. I would imagine that the family's attorney is focusing more on holding the government itself accountable through the Federal Torts Claim Act. (The Federal Torts Claims Act allows individuals to sue the federal government for monetary damages due to injury, property loss, or death caused by a federal employee's negligent or wrongful act while acting within the scope of their job.)

In a civil case like this, what are the potential outcomes?

For a civil case, what the family will be pursuing are damages. So that means compensation for the loss of their loved one. That’s very different from criminal sanctions, so there wouldn't be any arrests, or jail or prison time for agent Ross.

The Justice Department and the Trump administration are not pursuing criminal charges against Ross right now. But typically, do civil cases ever help to gain more evidence or create more of an opportunity for criminal charges?

They definitely don't hurt. There are so few situations in which prosecutors actually file criminal charges against law enforcement officers when they use excessive force, even if it's a very clear case, even if you have kind of progressive prosecutors who do want to hold law enforcement accountable. It's less than 2 percent of cases where that happens. And for federal law enforcement officers, it's even lower.

So a civil case could help, but usually if you see any interest in prosecuting an officer, it happens pretty swiftly and pretty quickly.  But the statute of limitations in these cases are pretty long, and so it's very possible that a different administration could pick up a criminal prosecution and the outcome of a civil case could, could assist in that.

Is there any precedent for suing an ICE agent?

Yeah, it's definitely happening much more frequently. But it isn't without precedent. Prior to that Egbert v. Boule case that I mentioned, the Supreme Court decided a case that involved Border Patrol. It was a shooting that happened in a case called Hernandez v. Mesa. And so these issues of unlawful use of force, we're seeing them happen much, much more often this year and in 2025 than we had in the past. But they have certainly happened before, and have been sued over before.

I would say, though, that a lot of the more recent cases that we're seeing really haven't been litigated to conclusion yet. All the violence that we saw during the protests and the ICE raids that were happening this past summer, a lot of those cases are just starting to get going right now. So in terms of this kind of recent wave of ICE violence, a lot of those cases are still playing out. And I think they'll be in an interesting posture, because they are for the most part, being litigated under the Federal Tort Claims Act instead of the Bivens constitutional framework.

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