SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston has good round up of the case’s implications, including the possiblity that Scalia is gearing up for a full-scale attack on the exclusionary rule, and that no-knocks are only the beginning. He also notes that the Court shows an unprecedented trust in police officers to uphold constitutional protections, and that Kennedy, as he often does, sought to put some distance between himself and Scalia’s hard line while, in the end, wholly signing on to it (a particularly frustrating fudge given that this was a 5-4 vote).

Denniston also rightly points out the almost mocking tone Scalia employs when discussing the reasons for the knock-and-announce rule. Just for review, those reasons would include the terror and fright associated with having once door beaten down in the middle of the night by armed, masked men; the unimaginable predicament a homeowner is unwillingly put in when he must decide if the intruders are cops or criminals, and whether to confront them or succumb to them; the injury and death that often transpires (to police, suspects, and bystanders) as a result; the right to assume one’s home is his castle and place of asylum, and the idea that one should have the opportunity to answer police and avoid the fright and property destruction resulting from a forced entry; and the fact that the perilousness of the situation can lead to police themselves mistaking harmless gestures on the part of suspects as threatening or menacing, again resulting in unnecessary death and injury.

Scalia instead boils down the reasoning behind the knock-and-announce rule to, simply, “the right not to be intruded upon in one’s nightclothes.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 2:13 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.