THE SUPREME COURT ALLOWS A QUESTIONABLE SEARCH AND SEIZURE

The United States Supreme Court last week injected some common sense
into the "exclusionary rule," one of the more bizarre doctrines in the
American legal system. Thanks to the 5-4 decision in Hudson vs.
Michigan, criminals won't go free just because law enforcement
officers waited only five seconds to barge into a house after knocking
on the door and shouting, "Police. Search warrant."

Prior to the ruling, police etiquette required about a 20-second wait.
Otherwise, seized evidence could be thrown out because of a technical
violation of the "knock and announce" provision of the common law.

The ruling is limited in scope, but it could lead to further
challenges to the exclusionary rule, created by the Supreme Court in
1914 in federal law and expanded to the states in a 1961 high court
decision. Under the rule, illegally obtained evidence, in most
instances, can't be introduced into criminal proceedings. It was
designed to deter police misconduct.

In the Hudson case, the prosecution admitted police didn't wait long
enough after announcing their presence before entering a drug dealer's
home, where they found contraband. The Michigan Supreme Court,
however, declared that excluding the evidence was too extreme a remedy
to deter police wrongdoing, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed.

Society must take steps to protect the Fourth Amendment prohibition
against unreasonable searches and seizures. But there are other ways
to accomplish this than by issuing what Justice Antonin Scalia called
a "get-out-of-jail-free card" for technical violations of the law. One
method is to allow illegally seized evidence to be introduced at
trial, but to sanction the law enforcement officers who acted improperly.

Civil libertarians cringe at the thought of any changes to the
exclusionary rule, but allowing a murderer, rapist, drug dealer or
terrorist to escape punishment on a technicality isn't justice. It's
foolishness, and it shouldn't be allowed to happen.

BOTTOM LINE: The court has brought some balance to the exclusionary
rule.