They found neither. But they did seize a gun owned by Ms. Millender, who was 73. The gun was legal, and she said she kept it for self-defense.
The Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday in Ms. Mellender’s lawsuit against the police for what she said was a violation of her rights under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Both the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union filed briefs supporting her position.
The police had obtained a warrant to search Ms. Millender’s home, but lower courts ruled that it violated the Fourth Amendment because parts of it were not supported by probable cause. In particular, they said, the warrant improperly allowed the police to search for “all handguns, shotguns and rifles” and “evidence showing street gang membership.”
The question for the justices was whether the police officers who obtained the warrant could be sued for the violation. A 1986 Supreme Court decision, Malley v. Briggs, said police officers should be denied immunity from such lawsuits “only where the warrant application is so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in its existence unreasonable.”
At the argument on Monday, Justice Antonin Scalia paraphrased that standard.
“If he’s so stupid that he executes a warrant that no reasonable officer could think was correct,” the justice said of a hypothetical officer, “he’s in the pot, right?”
A lawyer for the officers, Timothy T. Coates, said that was correct.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said it might count for something that the officers Ms. Millender sued had submitted the materials seeking the warrant to their superiors and to a judge, who all approved them.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not seem inclined to adopt that rationale, calling it “a Nuremberg defense,” in which “simply because supervisors decide that it’s O.K. that exculpates someone from responsibility.”
But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said there was “something strange about the rule we are applying here” because it placed too much responsibility on police officers.
“We are asking,” he said, “whether a reasonable police officer who is not a lawyer and certainly is not a judge should have been able to see that this call that was made by a judge was not only wrong, but so wrong that you couldn’t reasonably think that the judge might be correct.”
Justice Sotomayor said the warrant at issue in the case, Messerschmidt v. Millender, No. 10-704, was so broad that it was comparable to “the general warrant that our founding fathers in part passed the Fourth Amendment against.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a similar point about language in the warrant concerning photographs. “What about a provision for any photographs that depict evidence of criminal activity?” she asked. “That seems to me as general as you can get.”
Mr. Coates said the passage was in a paragraph concerning gang activities and should be read in that context.
Paul R. Q. Wolfson, a lawyer for Ms. Millender, who died in July, and members of her family, said the fact that the police “searched the house from top to bottom and seized Mrs. Millender’s lawfully owned weapon really shows that this case is in the heartland of what the Fourth Amendment is concerned about.”
“I mean,” he continued, “this is exactly the kind of case that the framers were concerned about when they abolished the general warrant.”