SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — The United States Supreme Court ruled Monday that two San Francisco police officers are immune from liability for shooting a mentally ill woman five times in 2008.

The judges voted 6-2 in favor of granting the officer qualified immunity on claims that they violated the Fourth Amendment when they entered the bedroom of Teresa Sheehan on August 7, 2008. The judges declined to rule on whether the officers failed to give reasonable accommodations for the woman’s disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Sheehan survived that shooting and filed a federal civil rights suit in 2009. That suit was dismissed by a San Francisco District Court judge, but was reinstated by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who decided that the ADA applies to arrests.

Sheehan was living with schizoaffective disorder, and at the time of the shooting was living in a group home in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The officers responded when a social worker became concerned that Sheehan, then 56, had stopped taking her medication, changing her clothes or eating, according to the Supreme Court ruling.

When the social worker knocked on her door and didn’t receive an answer, he used his key to open the door. When he entered, Sheehan started yelling, “Get out of here! You don’t have a warrant! I have a knife, and I’ll kill you if I have to.”

SFPD Sgt. Kimberly Reynolds and Officer Katherine Holder were the two officers who responded to the call for service. The two knocked on the door, and when Sheehan didn’t answer, they opened the door. When they started to walk in, Sheehan threatened the duo with a 5-inch kitchen knife.

A majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito states that the actions of the two officers in entering the room and later using lethal force was reasonable under the circumstances. The ruling leaves open the question of whether there was a Fourth Amendment violation in the officers entering the room a second time, but found that the officers’ failure to accommodate her illness did not violate clearly established law.

But the question of whether the protections against discrimination for people with mental illnesses provided by the ADA applies to arrests remains open.

The court decided that such individuals may in fact be due special considerations in police contact, and acknowledged there was disagreement in Circuit courts on this issue, but declined to rule on it because the case was inadequately argued by San Francisco.

A dissenting opinion by Justices Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan accuses the city of not properly arguing that case by design. They argue the court would not have taken the case without the ADA aspect, but instead ruled

only on the Fourth Amendment claims — an aspect of the case the high court would not have taken up on its own merits.

But the ruling appears to allow Sheehan to take her case back to a lower court for a trial on the claim that the officers violated the ADA by not adequately taking her illness into account.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who is the brother of Charles Breyer, recused himself from participating in the case.