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 Editorials | At Issue | June 2006 
US High Court Backs Police No-Knock Searches
 Fred Barbash - Washington Post
A divided Supreme Court ruled today that evidence can be used against a defendant even when seized in violation of a long-standing rule requiring a knock on the door before executing a search warrant.
The 5-4 decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, ran counter to previous decisions requiring suppression of evidence obtained in violation of the so-called "knock and announce" rule.
Dissenting Justice Stephen G. Breyer, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, charged that the court's opinion "destroys the strongest legal incentive to comply" with the door-knocking requirement and "weakens, perhaps destroys," much of its "practical value."
Today's case, Hudson v. Michigan , stemmed from a 1998 drug and weapons search, authorized by warrant, of a home in Detroit.
While the officers yelled, "Police, search warrant!" before opening the door, they chose not to knock, they said later, for fear of being shot on the way in.
Having acknowledged that they broke the rule required under the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure protections, the question today was whether the evidence was then properly admitted at a trial that led to the conviction of Booker T. Hudson or whether it should have been suppressed under the "exclusionary rule" established by the Supreme Court to deter unlawful police conduct.
"The common-law principle that law enforcement officers must announce their presence and provide residents an opportunity to open the door is an ancient one," said Scalia in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy.
"Suppression of evidence, however, has always been our last resort, not our first impulse," he wrote. It "generates substantial social costs which sometimes include setting the guilty free and the dangerous at large."
In this case, Scalia said, there was no causal connection between the constitutional violation, the failure to knock and the discovery of the evidence. Rather, it was the search warrant itself that produced the evidence.
"What the knock-and-announce rule has never protected . . . is one's interest in preventing the government from seeing or taking evidence described in a warrant. Since the interests that were violated in this case have nothing to do with the seizure of the evidence," Scalia said, "the exclusionary rule is inappropriate."
Kennedy wrote separately to stress what he called the narrowness of today's decision, which he said should not be read as diminishing the knock-and-announce requirement or the exclusionary rule itself.
Breyer, by contrast, wrote that the decision does indeed diminish the requirement and represents a significant departure from "basic principles" established by the court and common law.
Breyer took particular exception to Scalia's claim that "causality" - a direct link between the violation and the evidence - should be a factor in applying the exclusionary rule. That reasoning, said Breyer, could make the Fourth Amendment unworkable. |
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