No recourse
Victims of police raids on the wrong house have no recourse:
Neither ruling is consistent with a society that allegedly values individual rights, even without the express protections offered by the Fourth Amendment. This ruling in particular evokes Justice Scalia’s flp (sic) aside in Hudson that the only purpose of requiring the police to give notice is to avoid the harm of “being seen in one’s night clothes.” That the Supreme Court can continue to issue rulings like this one in spite of the Fourth Amendment shows that the Castle Doctrine, freedom from unreasonable search, and privacy in general are all but dead in this country.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:58 am
What? Do you mean to tell me that the Fourth Amendment allows reasonable searches and seizures, and also permits warrants to be issued upon probable cause? Horrors.
Seriously, though, think about how civil libertarians would feel if Radley’s logic were employed in reverse. If factual innocence on the part of the person searched means that an otherwise reasonable search should automatically be deemed unreasonable, then by the same logic, shouldn’t factual guilt mean that an otherwise unreasonable search should be deemed reasonable?
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:06 am
I don’t think going to the wrong house and not letting the people put their clothes on and with a warrant that was obviously factually deficient is, err, reasonable.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:09 am
The warrant isn’t reasonable if the police failed to do the proper police work. In this case there was a public record of the fact that the house had been sold. Also, if the bad guys were not living there, I suppose it would be pretty hard to actually witness the bad guys going in and out of the residence.
Reasonable warrants are never “rubber-stamped”.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:20 am
What? Do you mean to tell me that as long as you get your paperwork in order, you can conduct a raid with rampant negligence and complete disregard for reason, and that’s reasonable under the 4th Amendment? Hell, even the rug pissers in The Big Lebowski figured out they had the wrong guy faster than this.
Funny, I don’t see the “unless it is dangerous for the agents of the state” exception in the constitution.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:22 am
Uh, isn’t there already enough wiggle room for the police to claim teh “good faith” exemption? U.S. v. Leon? What about “inevitable discovery” or “independent source” mischief?
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:54 am
It doesn’t sound to me like this was the “wrong house”. To me raiding the wrong house is like raiding the house across the street by mistake or misreading the house number.
In this case it appears as though the police raided the right house (the house on the warrant), but were issued a warrant on the wrong house. It’s nuance, but there is a difference.
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:31 pm
There is always recourse. What should have been pointed out is that there now may be no non-violent recourse.
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Uncle:
Let me get this straight: just because a house believed to be occupied by identity thieves turned out to have been sold in the previous three months makes the warrant “obviously” factually deficient, and taking two whole minutes to figure out that you’ve made a mistake before apologizing to the residents and encouraging them to put their clothes on is inherently “unreasonable?” Really? If that’s the standard, we might as well just forget about reasonableness and the Fourth Amendment, and instead ban searches and seizures altogether.
Phelps:
Really? Two minutes strikes me as pretty damned quick to me, but YMMV. Did you actually read the case, or just Radley Balko’s ignorant blatherings (but I repeat myself) about it?
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Well, that could have been easily verified. And (as SM noted) their report said they had seen the suspects moving in and out.
I think it’s reasonable to expect the police to do their homework.
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:51 pm
As I mentioned elsewhere:
Part of the problem in this case is the homeowners specifically chose not to challenge the validity of the search warrant itself. If we accept as fact that the warrant was valid (which we must for the purposes of the case as both parties agreed it was), it’s not clear how the cops could have behaved differently.
The real issue is that the police failed to do a proper investigation (e.g. doing a title search) before getting the warrant, and had the couple challenged on that ground they would have had a stronger case.
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:53 pm
SU: Whose report said the cops saw the bad guys moving out? The Supreme Court decision doesn’t say anything about that, and the appellate decision was unpublished. Even SM’s comment doesn’t allege that.
SD: they did indeed challenge the validity of the underlying warrant at trial, where they lost. There is a probably a reason why the couple did not pursue that issue on appeal, probably after consulting an attorney who specialized in appellate law, and almost certainly for reasons having to do with the fact that not all dogs are into hunting.
I also don’t know why you are making such a big deal out of title search. Do you have reason to believe none was conducted, or are you arguing that cop shoulds conduct a new one every month “just in case?” If the cops reasonably conducted a title search at the beginning of their investigation, in September 2001, they would have obtained a match on the suspects – assuming, of course, that the suspects held title to the house in their own names, or any assumed names known to the police. If they ran it in October, same result – these things never update that quickly. If they ran it in November, they may or may not have gotten records on the new owners, but even that would not have been dispositive unless they had reason to know the original occupants owned rather than renting. Even if they had intentionally delayed a title search until 12/11/01, the day they obtained the warrant, there’s still no guarantee that they would have obtained proof that the right house was now the wrong one.
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:01 pm
SM said:
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Which is almost the opposite of what you said he said:
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:59 pm
[…] No recourse […]
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Whoops. typed that from memory. my bad.
doesn’t discount that the cops should have made sure they lived there though.
May 22nd, 2007 at 11:50 pm
In theory, maybe, but the standard is probable cause (more likely than not) to obtain the warrant, and “reasonableness” (probable cause, if that) to execute it. I see no reason to doubt for a second that the cops had probable cause when they obtained the warrant, and a reasonable, good faith basis for believing it valid when they executed it, one whole week later.
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:29 am
How many more Kathryn Johnston are we going to allow.
This is why I am becoming firmly against the use of no-knock-warrents to be used by police. If they don’t reform them there will be more needless death and injury by the “special people”. That is what this current ruling is going to produce.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:47 am
I read the news story. I missed the 2 minute part.
Two minutes, if true, seems reasonable. Because it was a not a no-knock, I’ll presume that there was no damage to the actual house, just some dignity. I still don’t see where a small award (one kilobuck) would be a bad idea. Might make the police a tad more careful.
I’m afraid, however, of this case being used as a precedent for the Kathryn Johnson quick and dirty rubber-stamp dynamic entry.
As you will recall, it started with a rubber-stamp warrant on the flimsiest whim, and ended with someone bleeding on the floor while the police – after scouring the place looking for milk crates or illegally copied videos – decided to plant some drugs in the house as a cover-up.
Were the police to obtain a warrant on my house, I could see no reason at all to have a no-knock (or knock and announce and break the door down and lie about it afterwards). Both my roommate and myself regularly leave to go to work and stuff and it would be far safer to pull us over at a traffic stop, detain us, and serve the warrant in broad daylight that to do the 3am dynamic entry. Someone would get shot in that second case.
Simple surveillance (a time laps camera in a parked car) could safely and inexpensively map our daily habits. That route, however, would make a pretty lousy “reality TV” show.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:43 pm
This is not the Kathryn Johnston case, nor anything remotely analogous to it. Hell, it didn’t even involve drugs, a no-knock warrant, or any of the other issues that normally get Radley One Note so riled up. Like the boy who cried wolf, Johnston was the rare case where there really was a wolf. This case isn’t even close.
May 23rd, 2007 at 1:12 pm
xlrq, going by your timeline, there is no excuse for the cops to not know the suspects no longer lived there. They had move two months prior, yet you say the warrant was served only a week after issuance. What the Hell did the cops do in that 60 days? Pretty poor policing. Nobody I know could keep a job performed so poorly.
Michael, you stated, “If they don’t reform them there will be more needless death and injury by the “special people”. ”
It will actually be worse than that because we can add in more needless death and injury of the “special” people too. There is a breaking point where policing organization will become looked upon as a terroristic occupying force by even the mildest and most law abiding of us. Unfortunately, for all, only the policing agencies control that dynamic and they seem to stupid to realize what the consequences will be if they don’t right themselves.
May 23rd, 2007 at 1:13 pm
here’s the o I left out of too in “to stupid”.
May 24th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Oh, I dunno, maybe they … um … investigated the friggin’ case?! You’re really reaching, pal.