The Police No Longer Have to Knock Before Busting Into Your House

Oh oh. Looks like I may have erred in supporting the confirmations of Roberts and Alito - hoodwinked by the Bush administration again! This is a terrible ruling. Simply flushing more of the Bill of Rights down the toilet.

If the police go to the wrong house and bust the door down without knocking and a policemen gets shot by a startled owner, will the owner get in trouble?

Top court upholds no-knock police search

By Gina Holland, Associated Press Writer ​

The Supreme Court made it easier Thursday for police to barge into homes and seize evidence without knocking or waiting, a sign of the court's new conservatism with Samuel Alito on board.

The court, on a 5-4 vote, said judges cannot throw out evidence collected by police who have search warrants but do not properly announce their arrival.

It was a significant rollback of earlier rulings protective of homeowners, even unsympathetic homeowners like Booker Hudson, who had a loaded gun next to him and cocaine rocks in his pocket when Detroit police entered his unlocked home in 1998 without knocking.

The court's five-member conservative majority, anchored by new Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito, said that police blunders should not result in "a get-out-of-jail-free card" for defendants.

Dissenting justices predicted that police will now feel free to ignore previous court rulings requiring officers with search warrants to knock and announce themselves to avoid running afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches.

"The knock-and-announce rule is dead in the United States," said David Moran, a Wayne State University professor who represented Hudson. "There are going to be a lot more doors knocked down. There are going to be a lot more people terrified and humiliated."

- http://tinyurl.com/fl2vs

 

The knock and announce rule has always had an exception for situations where the authorities believe there is probable cause that announcing their presence would result in the destruction of evidence. This new ruling means that the police no longer have to have probable cause that evidence will be destroyed before using a warrant to bust into your home unannounced.

 

The only question we should be asking is this: Why should anyone any longer trust Republican appointments of federal judges to uphold the U.S. constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights?

This incident further drives me away from the Republican Party. Any hope that Republicans had that I would be voting for any of their candidates on any level of government this November is now totally and completely gone. I was seriously thinking about voting for the GOP candidate for Lt. Governor in Arkansas but I will not do so now. I may leave myself open to being accused of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but so be it.

 

1) No. I can just skip the political office races and vote on whatever constitutional amendments we have before us.

2) I am not an isolationist. Remember, I may be the only person on this board that likes the Council on Foreign Relations. :smilewinkgrin:

 

A very interesting column from a couple of months ago about this case which states in part:

"It's impossible to estimate just how many wrong-door raids occur. Police and prosecutors are notoriously inept at keeping track of their own mistakes, and victims of botched raids are often too terrified or fearful of retribution to come forward. But over the course of researching a paper for the Cato Institute on the subject, I've found close to 200 such cases over the last 15 years. And those are just the cases that have been reported.

It's bad enough when the police serve a no-knock warrant at the wrong place. But this is not regular service of a warrant. No-knock raids are typically carried out by masked, heavily armed SWAT teams using paramilitary tactics more appropriate for the battlefield than the living room. In fact, the rise in no-knock warrants over the last 25 years neatly corresponds with the rise in the number and frequency of use of SWAT teams. Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska, a widely cited expert on the "militarization" of domestic police departments, estimates that the number of SWAT team deployments has jumped from 3,000 a year in the early 1980s to more than 40,000 a year by the early 2000s.

In the 1995 case Wilson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court for the first time ruled that at least in principle, the Fourth Amendment requires police to knock and announce themselves before entering a private home. In doing so, the court acknowledged the centuries-old "Castle Doctrine" from English common law, which states that a man has the right to defend his home and his family from intruders. The announcement requirement gives an innocent suspect the opportunity to persuade the police that they've targeted the wrong residence before having his home invaded. It also protects police from being targeted by innocent homeowners who have mistaken them for criminal intruders and those same homeowners from the burden of determining if the armed intruders in their home are police or criminals.

But Wilson didn't eliminate no-knocks. In the same decision, the court recognized three broad exceptions, called "exigent circumstances," to the announcement requirement. The most pertinent of these state that if police believe announcing themselves before entering would present a threat to officer safety, or if they believe a suspect is particularly likely to destroy evidence, they may enter a home without first announcing their presence.

A legal no-knock raid, then, can happen in one of two ways. Police can make the case for exigent circumstances to a judge, who then issues a no-knock warrant; or police can determine at the scene that the exigent circumstances exist and make the call for a no-knock raid on the spot. In the latter case, courts will determine after the fact if the raid was legal.
In the real world, the exigent-circumstances exceptions have been so broadly interpreted since Wilson, they've overwhelmed the rule. No-knock raids have been justified on the flimsiest of reasons, including that the suspect was a licensed, registered gun owner (NRA, take note!), or that the mere presence of indoor plumbing could be enough to trigger the "destruction of evidence" exception.

In fact, in many places the announcement requirement is now treated more like an antiquated ritual than compliance with a suspect's constitutional rights. In 1999, for example, the assistant police chief of El Monte, Calif., explained his department's preferred procedure to the Los Angeles Times: "We do bang on the door and make an announcement—'It's the police'—but it kind of runs together. If you're sitting on the couch, it would be difficult to get to the door before they knock it down."

That comment came in a story about a mistaken raid in which Mario Paz, an innocent man, was shot dead by a raiding SWAT team when he mistook them for criminal intruders and reached for a gun to defend himself."

- more at www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6344

 

It's one more reason why the 4th Amendment should be obeyed by government officials.

 

"There is none so blind as they that won’t see." - Jonathan Swift