Eight years ago, Baltimore County Police knocked on an apartment door in Randallstown to serve a warrant on a 23-year-old hairstylist with a history of mental illness.

Six hours later, the encounter ended with a police officer firing through a wall, killing Korryn Gaines and injuring her 5-year-old son, Kodi.

The family sued police on Kodi’s behalf, initially winning but then losing as the case made its way through state courts. Now, his attorneys are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether the shooting violated the boy’s constitutional rights. Such requests aren’t granted often, but Kodi Gaines Cunningham has some notable friends on his side.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has filed an amicus brief supporting Kodi’s claims. Its attorneys argue that the shooting violated rights that were enshrined in the 14th Amendment, which says states cannot deprive citizens of life, liberty or property without due process of law; and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which enforced those due process provisions when white supremacists were killing Black citizens with impunity.

The case challenges the high court’s 1982 ruling on the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which found that public officials cannot be sued if their actions do not violate laws or constitutional rights as understood by a “reasonable person.”

Advocates of criminal justice reform argue that this standard is a nearly impossible hurdle.

“I’ve spent weeks looking through cases where officers shoot through a wall and they don’t exist,” said Kodi’s attorney, Leslie D. Hershfield. “Why should they?”

A decision in Kodi’s favor would make it easier to sue police and other public officials for their actions.

Maryland’s courts ruled that qualified immunity applied in Kodi’s case because Baltimore County Police Cpl. Royce Ruby did not intentionally shoot Kodi, and because the boy’s shooting did not rise to the required standard of “shocking the conscience” under the 14th Amendment.

A Baltimore County jury did find police liable for Korryn Gaines’ death under the Fourth Amendment, deciding that the officer’s actions were unreasonable; however, that standard did not apply to Kodi’s case because he was not the intended target.

Hirschfield noted that Kodi had fewer rights than his mother who was holding a gun.

“The Maryland courts found that the shooting of Korryn was unlawful, but it was acceptable for Kodi, because he was not an expected victim — which is preposterous,” said Mike Fox, a legal fellow with Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice. “You can’t fire a weapon into a wall, blindly, where you know a child to be.”

Fox said the Supreme Court decision on whether to take up the case, which should come in a week or two, is hard to predict. The court has a 6-3 conservative supermajority, he added, but is not necessarily pro-law enforcement.

In 2020, it heard the case of Taylor v. Riojas, which centered on Texas prison guards holding an inmate in shockingly unsanitary conditions. The court ruled that qualified immunity did not apply because, the justices found, “any reasonable officer should have realized” that those conditions violated the Constitution.

The high court also agreed to hear Barnes vs. Felix, which revolves around the “moment of threat doctrine” in excessive-force cases. In that case, a police constable killed a man during a traffic stop due to unpaid tolls on a car that man’s girlfriend rented for him.

In Kodi’s case, the state court’s ruling said the qualified immunity gave it no choice in how to rule.

“I don’t think anyone was high-fiving each other after the opinion came out,” Clark Neily, Cato’s senior vice president for legal studies, said after the Maryland Supreme Court ruling.

The case stems from the Aug. 1, 2016, encounter when officers went to Gaines’ Randallstown apartment to serve a warrant for a traffic violation.

They knocked on the door, but no one answered. The officers heard movement, so they entered — using a key from the landlord — and kicked in the door because it was chained.

Inside, they found Korryn Gaines sitting on the floor holding a shotgun. Police retreated and called for backup. A SWAT team that included Ruby took positions outside. Her fiancé, Kareem Courtney, left with the couple’s 1-year-old daughter and tried to persuade Gaines to do the same.

Gaines recorded parts of the encounter in the sweltering apartment and posted live videos on Facebook until the company blocked her access. They remain on YouTube, with Gaines saying she is home “with the devil at my door, refusing to leave” as police talk through the door.

After about six hours of negotiations, she entered the kitchen with the gun to make her son a sandwich.

Ruby then fired a “head shot” through the wall, aiming high to avoid the child. The bullet hit Korryn Gaines in the back, ricocheted off the refrigerator, and struck Kodi’s cheek. A few seconds later, Gaines fired her shotgun. Ruby then led a team into the kitchen and and she was shot three more times. He later admitted to being “hot and frustrated,” according to court documents.

The Gaines family and Kodi’s father sued Baltimore County. In 2018, after a 14-day trial, a jury took four hours to award Gaines’ estate $38 million in damages and Kodi $32 million.

A year later, Circuit Court Judge Mickey Norman, a former state trooper, threw out the jury’s verdict. Norman ordered Baltimore County to pay Kodi $400,000 plus interest of $160,000.

The ACLU called Norman’s actions “a textbook example of a jurist improperly usurping the role of the jury because he did not like or agree with his findings.”

In 2021, the Gaines family settled with Baltimore County for $3 million over Korryn’s claims, but Kodi’s claims have never been settled. Now 13, he has had many medical issues from shrapnel throughout his body and damage to his face and his elbow.

“It’s a daily struggle,” Hershfield said. “He’s having to trust a world that, in front of him, took away his mother and shot him.”

Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger declined to charge Ruby criminally, calling the shooting justified. Ruby is now retired.

Gaines’ death did lead to a series of reforms in 2020, when Baltimore County Councilman Julian Jones Jr. worked to pass the SMART Policing Act. Among other provisions, it outlaws chokeholds, requires de-escalation training, and prohibits hiring officers with problematic records from other jurisdictions.

It took public outrage over the 2020 death of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police officers to convince other council members to join Jones, the council’s sole Black member. Even then, Jones had to break up the legislation into parts after colleagues tabled a more comprehensive measure. Jones thinks the reforms made the department better.

“At the end of the day, we shot and killed a mother,” he said. “Anybody would agree that that was not the desired outcome.”