SEARCHES BY POLICE DRAWING SCRUTINY

A month ago, 17 police officers converged on a brick home in a
middle-class neighborhood in North Richland Hills. Without warning,
they broke through the front door.

Minutes later, 25-year-old Troy Davis was dead, shot in the chest.
Police said he had pointed a loaded handgun at two officers, one of
whom shot him.

In the Davis case, as in many cases around the country, police said
they used the "no-knock" entry for their search to protect officers
from potential harm.

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that although police usually must
"knock and announce" themselves before conducting a search -- an idea
enshrined in the Bill of Rights and in English common law before that
- -- they can enter without warning if an announcement could endanger
officers or enable suspects to destroy evidence.

"Safety has to come first," said Lt. Larry Romines of the Northeast
Tarrant County Drug Task Force.

But no-knock warrants are attracting increasing scrutiny around the
country as residents object to military-style police tactics. In some
cases, members of tactical units have broken down doors while wearing
black masks.

Some legal experts say they are troubled that there are no clear
guidelines for when police may use a no-knock warrant. That can invite
police to overuse the procedure, experts say.

"I have seen cases where the prosecution relies on things like ... the
premises had plumbing" and police were concerned that a person
suspected of drug dealing might flush the evidence down the toilet,
said George Dix, a professor at the University of Texas Law School.

Last week in Los Angeles County, a jury awarded $5 million to the
family of Donald P. Scott, who was shot to death by a Los Angeles
County sheriff's deputy in 1992. Deputies surprised Scott during a
search for drugs at his 200-acre ranch, and they shot him when he
emerged from his bedroom carrying a pistol, according to news reports.

In September, police in Denver killed Ismael Mena during a no-knock
search of his home. The tactical team that served the warrant was
looking for drugs and found none, according to the Colorado chapter of
the American Civil Liberties Union.

In Houston, six officers were fired after police killed a man during a
drug raid in 1998. The officers said they had been tipped that Pedro
Oregon Navarro had been selling drugs, but they did not obtain a
warrant and kicked down his door. Oregon was shot 12 times. Two of the
officers were indicted in September on civil rights charges.

It is difficult to know how many no-knock searches are conducted in
Texas because, unlike some states, Texas doesn't require a special
warrant. When asking a judge for a search warrant, officers typically
specify whether they plan a no-knock search. But officers also have
discretion to decide at the scene whether to do a no-knock search.

There is a wide difference of opinion between defense attorneys and
prosecutors about how widespread the practice is.

Law enforcement tends to see the searches as unusual.

"Generally speaking, I think no-knock searches are really quite rare
nowadays. They're usually going to be under circumstances where the
officers were in fear of their lives, fear of destruction of
evidence," said Chuck Mallon, head of the appellate section of the
Tarrant County district attorney's office.

But Richard Gladden, a defense attorney in Denton who argued a
no-knock case before the U.S. Supreme Court, said the searches are "a
routine practice."

Gladden represented Charlene Leatherman and Gerald Andert in the
Supreme Court case. Officers from the Tarrant County Narcotics
Intelligence and Coordination Unit had conducted no-knock raids in
1989 at Leatherman's house in Lake Worth and at Andert's home in
Southlake. Leatherman's two dogs were killed, and Andert suffered a
cut on his head. No drugs were found and the suspects were never charged.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Leatherman and Andert
families were entitled to sue for damages in federal court. But the
civil trial ended with a judge dismissing the case because of
insufficient evidence, Gladden said. The families never received money
from Tarrant County.

Dix said police in Texas tend to use more no-knock warrants than
police in other states because Texas courts have been lenient on such
searches.

The state Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in 1929 that even if police
do not announce their presence before serving a warrant, evidence from
the search is admissible in court, provided the warrant was legal.

"Up until several years ago, it was ambiguous whether announcement was
ever required by the federal Constitution," Dix said.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1995 that in most circumstances,
police must "knock and announce" before they enter a person's home
with a search warrant, except when an officer could be endangered or
evidence could be destroyed.

In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down a Wisconsin law that gave
blanket authority for no-knock searches in narcotics cases. The court
ruled that each case must be judged individually.

But, Dix said, the justices "very, very carefully avoided providing
any guidance ... on the admissibility of evidence in a [no-knock] search."

Civil liberties groups say they are troubled that police obtain search
warrants and conduct no-knock entries based on tips from informants.
In the Davis case, police relied on the word of an informant whom they
had not worked with before and did little to corroborate his story,
according to the search warrant affidavit.

"Snitches can have an ax to grind. They can say such-and-such is
dating my sister and they smoke pot, so I'm going to snitch on them,"
said Chad Thavenot, a spokesman for the Criminal Justice Policy
Foundation in Washington, D.C.

In the Mena case in Colorado, police obtained a search warrant based
on an officer's testimony that an informant had bought cocaine at
Mena's home.

"Judging from the affidavit, I don't believe there were enough facts
to justify issuing even a search warrant, let alone a no-knock
warrant," said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil
Liberties Union of Colorado.

Still, District Judge Joe Drago, the longest-serving judge in Tarrant
County, said it is legal to issue a search warrant based on an
informant's word, "if he's reliable."

With an untested informant, Drago said, police "have got to at least
allege something like, he's never been in trouble with the law before,
that he's an upstanding citizen."

"I think I've had occasions where I said, `You don't have enough here,
go back and redo this,' " Drago said.

In the Davis case, police have maintained that the no-knock approach
was justified because Davis had been known to answer the door with a
gun in his hand.

After the search, police said they found three marijuana plants,
enough of the designer drug gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, for 600
doses, and 16 guns, including the pistol that they said was in Davis'
hand, and a loaded AR-15 assault rifle.

"The fruits of the search speak for themselves," police Sgt. Andy
Kancel said Jan. 7.

Davis' mother, true-crime author Barbara Davis, has said that most of
the guns belonged to her late husband, who was a reserve sheriff's
deputy. All the weapons are legal, authorities said, and GHB was sold
legally until last year, when the federal government banned it.

Lawyers for Barbara Davis have filed a lawsuit against North Richland
Hills, seeking depositions from three officers involved in the raid.
Her lawyers have said that more lawsuits may be filed.

Despite the criticism of no-knock entries, police continue to defend
the practice. Serving search warrants is dangerous, even under the
best circumstances, police say, and they don't want to give up the
element of surprise if they are dealing with people who might be armed
or are quickly able to dispose of evidence.

"It just depends on the circumstances," Dallas police spokesman Chris
Gilliam said.

Yet Nick Pastore, a former police chief of New Haven, Conn., who now
does research for the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, said he is
alarmed by the trend among police departments to do "hard entries."

"Why do you need a no-knock [warrant] for somebody growing pot? What
are they going to do, eat it?" he said. "If you wanted to investigate
it, all it would have taken was a knock on the door."

That Troy Davis kept guns in the house was not enough to warrant a
no-knock raid, Pastore said.

"If somebody was knocking my door down, I'd go get my gun, too," he
said. "There are more guns in American society than toasters. You've
got to assume that [a person has access to a gun]. It doesn't mean
that they're going to use it."

But there is little that police officers can do when they confront an
armed suspect, Pastore said.

"It's the police chief and the mayor that should be accountable for
that kind of thinking," he said.

Dennis Roberts, a San Francisco lawyer who specializes in police
brutality cases, agreed.

"Smart cops don't want to kick down doors, because that's how cops get
killed," he
said.