JUDGES RUBBER-STAMP NO-KNOCK RAIDS

No-knock search warrants appear to be approved so routinely
that some Denver judges have issued them even though police asked only
for a regular warrant.

In fact, The Denver Post has found, more than one of every 10 no-knock
warrants issued over the past seven months was transformed from a
regular warrant with just a judge's signature.

"Judges are generally rubber stamps for the police in signing
warrants," criminal defense lawyer David Lane said. "I've seen some of
the most defective warrants imaginable get approved. This is certainly
a Fourth Amendment violation since it's an unreasonable search as
there are no facts to support the no-knock." Denver County's former
presiding judge, George Manerbino, theorized that heavy workloads
could cause judges to sign warrants inappropriately.

"A judge has to be careful, and perhaps that's not happening,"
Manerbino said.

Among the unrequested no-knock warrants, court records show that
judges authorized police to batter into a car, a bank, and a house
where officers already were waiting with handcuffed suspects. Those
are unusual locations for no-knock raids, law-enforcement officials
and legal experts said.

While most no-knock warrants are meant to stem the drug trade, one
unsolicited no-knock warrant a judge signed was to retrieve a couch
and other stolen property, and another was for a butcher knife
allegedly used in an assault, records show.

Judges have signed 19 unrequested no-knock warrants over the past 12
months, records show, and police have confirmed that they executed two
of them. SWAT officers could have executed all of them, but they were
never asked to do so.

The number of authorized no-knocks could have been higher. Three
regular search warrants nearly became no-knock warrants when the judge
reviewing them began to sign the authorization, records show, then
stopped in mid-signature, apparently realizing the mistake.

A Denver Post review of 162 noknock warrants issued since February
1999 also shows:

Police more often than not found no guns where they said guns would
be.

Judges rarely denied police requests for a no-knock
raid.

The warrant process is littered with oversights and omissions that
critics say easily could lead to a fatal tragedy.

"It certainly raises the questions of whether judges are paying enough
attention, not just to the facts, but what the police are asking for
in the first place," said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the
American Civil Liberties Union in Colorado.

The Post's findings caused some legal experts to question the
search-warrant process and wonder how much attention is being paid to
a procedure that they say is becoming too easy and too frequently used.

"All this gives me pause to wonder why some warrants were being
requested and why the judge was granting them," said Manerbino, who
served as chief judge in Denver County for 14 years.

Manerbino said the volume of search-warrant requests a judge sees each
day - there are hundreds in a year - could become overwhelming,
especially in a busy courtroom. Still, that shouldn't be a crutch for
errors, he said.

Lane dismissed the explanation.

"It's not too much work. It's the frequency with which they're just
not doing their jobs." No-knock warrants are designed with two areas
for a judge's signature so they clearly know they're authorizing the
special search, said Denver Deputy District Attorney Chuck Lepley, who
created the form about 15 years ago.

"It made it better in that the judge knows for sure he's giving
permission for immediate entry,"

Lepley said. "He has to consciously sign two separate locations so
there's no mistake." But Lepley was clear: If the specific no-knock
request is not in the affidavit, then it shouldn't be approved.
No-knock search warrants - known as "immediate entry"
warrants - and how they are obtained have been the focus of intense
attention following the September fatal shooting of Mexican national
Ismael Mena by a Denver SWAT team during a drug raid.

Mayor Wellington Webb has called for a review of the warrant process
after prosecutors filed felony perjury charges against Officer Joseph
Bini for allegedly lying to get the warrant for Mena's house. The
affidavit contained a bad address, and SWAT officers raided the wrong
house. Nothing illicit was found in the ensuing search of Mena's house.

A judge approved Bini's request - called an affidavit - after Bini
swore that all its assertions were true.

But judges say they're only responsible for checking that an affidavit
has the facts to support the search and for believing what the
officers are telling them under oath.

Yet, The Post has found inconsistencies at each level of the warrant
process, including the last stop a no-knock warrant makes before
police begin their barrage. The review found:

Only five requests were not signed by a judge, compared with 162
approvals. That means just 3 percent of the no-knock raid requests
were denied. Experts say the approval rate is too high, and indicative
of a blanket-approval process, which they say is unconstitutional.

Affidavits for 19 warrants that were approved - four of them by County
Judge Arleen Ortiz-White - lacked wording to indicate the officers
wanted a noknock warrant. Every other noknock affidavit that judges
granted contained special phrasing for a no-knock warrant, including
one that was handwritten, apparently at the behest of the judge.

In 81 percent of the raids, police found no guns even though they
claimed in their affidavits that weapons were likely to be found. Fear
that suspected drug dealers might arm themselves if they knew police
were at the door is one of the most frequently used reasons for
obtaining a no-knock raid.

Only seven affidavits gave specific allegations or observations that
the suspects police were looking for had actually been seen with a gun
- - something legal experts say is imperative to getting a noknock
warrant. Of those, police were right only twice and a gun was
confiscated.

Nearly a third of the warrants apparently were never reviewed by an
assistant district attorney before they were presented to a judge.
It's police department policy, former Chief Tom Sanchez confirmed, to
have each search warrant reviewed by a prosecutor and to show that on
the warrant request. Many of those reviews occurred over the telephone.

The Post also found that two other warrants in which Bini had an
active investigative role became authorized no-knock warrants even
though the affidavit asks only for a regular search, record show.

And the judge who signed Bini's warrant to raid Mena's house - Raymond
Satter - in June authorized a no-knock warrant for what had been a
request for a regular search of a house police already had secured.

No-knock warrants require specific things. Among them: that police are
afraid for their safety because of the presence of weapons, or they
believe evidence they're seeking - usually drugs - will be destroyed
if they knock on the door first. Those facts weren't included in the
seven no-knock warrants that judges apparently authorized in error.

The Post's findings surprised some of the city's best-known
lawyers.

"I can't think of there ever being a time where I saw a warrant signed
in which the police didn't specifically request a no-knock," said
Chris Miranda, a Denver attorney who specializes in criminal defense
and civil-rights law.

"I think this whole war on drugs has perpetuated more (no-knock)
requests from law enforcement, and it's causing problems," Miranda
said.

Requests by The Post for interviews with several county judges were
referred to the court's presiding judge, Robert Patterson. He refused
to look at the warrants or render an opinion about a specific judge's
actions.

"We are not the fact gatherers," Patterson said, defending the process
by which judges issue warrants. "It's pretty formulaic how it's done."
Patterson conceded, however, that mistakes can happen.

"If you sign your name 100 times, you can look away and sign in the
wrong place," Patterson said. "We read a lot of documents. We may,
just like anyone else, sign something and realize later that it's the
wrong place or the wrong thing.

"Is it wrong not to be paying attention? No. It's just that we're
doing things over and over again," he said.

Some problems with no-knock warrants originate long before judges are
asked to sign them. Sometimes judges sign a no-knock warrant based on
information police said came from a "reliable informant" - only to
find later that the informant had an extensive criminal history of
convictions for lying to the police, Miranda said.

"Think about who the confidential informants are and that you're
starting from a precarious perch to get the no-knock warrant based on
what they say," Miranda said.

"Judges are not only not looking into the background of a person, but
there are no steps in place to confirm the informant's
information."

Along with an officer's anonymous source, nearly all no-knock warrant
requests over the past seven months - most of which involved narcotics
cases - were approved merely on police assertions that a regular
search could be dangerous for them or that the drugs they were seeking
could be destroyed.

"That's all they had to show, that someone could flush them down the
toilet," Manerbino said.

That violates the spirit of a 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision that
requires specific allegations behind every no-knock request, according
to the Wisconsin lawyer who made the federal court argument.

"It doesn't sound to me like the judges in Denver are paying that
close attention to this very critical search warrant," said David
Karpe of Madison. "The court was clear that just saying that there
could be a weapon there isn't enough. A generic request sounds like a
violation of the spirit of our case, as if it's a blanket approval,
which the court wholesalely disallowed." Lane said he was stunned that
two no-knock requests were denied.

"It's extraordinarily rare to do that," he said. "It's a blanket
presumption that if it's a narcotics case, it gets a no-knock. It
doesn't matter that the Supreme Court said it should be done on a
case-bycase basis. The judges are signing anyway. The cops have a
button on their word processors to do it. Point and click. It used to
be just a rubber stamp." Even Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter
acknowledges that noknock warrants are fairly simple to obtain, noting
that as long as police think someone can dispose of evidence or they
fear for their safety, a judge will allow them to get into the house
unannounced before that happens.

Ritter is one of three people on Webb's review committee, which also
includes Patterson and Manager of Safety Butch Montoya.

"It's a standard that doesn't require much more than saying that there
probably will be drugs in the home and with an immediate entry, they
should state that their safety is a concern or the drugs are at risk
of disposal," Ritter said.

It shouldn't be that simple, Silverstein said.

"Any search of a person's home should be handled with care, but they
should be especially careful if it's a no-knock warrant," Silverstein
said. "It endangers the lives of police and the individual residents."
While Ritter agrees that the warrants require a higher degree of care,
he was dismissive about how judges were signing them, saying they "are
human like the rest of us" and that "errors can happen."

Sometimes the wording - "your affiant requests an immediate entry
search warrant" or something similar - wasn't anywhere to be found in
the affidavit. That didn't matter.

In one case, a judge issued a noknock warrant on a house that police
already had secured and were waiting to search - facts clearly
outlined in the police affidavit given to the judge, records show. The
police merely wanted permission to search the house, not barrel
through the door.

The judge signed the no-knock authorization box anyway.

"The judges are signing things they shouldn't be signing, and that's a
sloppy system," Lane said.

SWAT officials said their units executed about 150 no-knock warrants
last year, but that's not a true accounting of the number of warrants
that were executed, police concede. Any police officer can execute a
no-knock warrant if it's signed by a judge, and police say they don't
keep track of those, although court records suggest the total to be
closer to 180.

Even Officer Bini, accused of lying to obtain the warrant that
eventually led to Mena's death, has executed his own no-knock warrants
in the past, records show.

In August, Bini raided a house on Humboldt Street on Denver's
northeast side and seized several items - but no drugs or weapons.
SWAT officials confirmed they had no part in that raid, and records
show it was founded on Bini's investigation.

"The bottom line is, the cops and the judges should be forced to
follow the letter of the law," Lane said. "It doesn't get more
invasive than a no-knock. But the judges aren't taking any more time
with a no-knock than if the search warrant was for something simple
and in plain view.

"That's a big, big problem," he said.