Supreme Court: No-knock police searches OK

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The case tested previous court rulings that police armed with warrants generally must knock and announce themselves or they run afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said Detroit police acknowledge violating that rule when they called out their presence at a man's door then went inside three seconds to five seconds later.

"Whether that preliminary misstep had occurred or not, the police would have executed the warrant they had obtained, and would have discovered the gun and drugs inside the house," Scalia wrote.

But suppressing evidence is too high of a penalty, Scalia said, for errors by police in failing to properly announce themselves.

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Frankly, I'm not personally terribly disturbed by the fact that the cops don't have to knock first anymore. As the Grateful Dead sang, "If you've got a warrant, I guess you're gonna come in." I mean, the courtesy is nice and all, but I don't see how it changes things one way or the other. On the other hand, an interesting scenario keeps coming up on the left-wing blogs: if a man has a right to shoot an uninvited intruder inside his home, and the cops are no longer going to knock and identify themselves, what's to stop a resident from mistakenly blowing away the police when they enter? There are obviously some problems with how this is all going to work out.

This doesn't mean I don't have huge problems with the ruling, however. What gets me is Scalia's statement: "suppressing evidence is too high of a penalty." He is, of course, referring to the famous but controversial for some exclusionary rule, and it sounds like the right-wingers on the Supreme Court bench are taking their first baby steps toward completely getting rid of it. It is an unfortunate procedural byproduct that the guilty sometimes go free because of the principle, but it's the only thing that actually gives the fourth amendment any enforceability. That is, if we simply rely on cops to police themselves on this, it's bye-bye for our right against unreasonable search and seizure. While many cops are honest, many are not, as my "Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes" posts these past few years have plainly shown. Furthermore, many honest cops will turn a blind eye to the bad behavior of their brothers-in-blue out of a displaced sense of loyalty. Hell, ultimately, honesty doesn't matter: most cops are pretty zealous in doing their jobs, which means that there is a built in incentive for them to bend the rules if it means they can make a bust--if there is no danger of losing the bust, there is no institutional incentive to follow the rules; we would simply be relying on the good will of manly authoritative men with badges and guns. In short, without the exclusionary rule, the fourth amendment is just writing on paper.

I hope these right-wing "strict constructionists," these judicial fundamentalists, know what they're doing. Probably not.

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