NO-KNOCK' RAIDS WEAKEN PRIVACY RIGHTS

In Hudson v. Michigan, the U.S. Supreme Court carved out yet another
"drug war exception" to the Fourth Amendment, which was written to
protect Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures of their
persons and homes.

Unfortunately, the ruling is likely to lead to more military-style
no-knock raids of people's homes and businesses, which will mean some
innocent people's homes will be raided.

The Fourth Amendment states, "The right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrant shall
issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or
things to be seized." It's an affirmation of the ancient common-law
principle that a person's home is his or her castle, that the
authorities cannot intrude on it without solid evidence of a crime
having been committed or being in progress.

The most direct way to enforce this rule probably would be to impose
fines or other penalties on police who violate it, but such penalties
are not realistic. So about 100 years ago the courts came up with the
"exclusionary rule": evidence seized in an illegal search is excluded
from any subsequent court case.

The situation is complicated when legislatures pass laws against
victimless crimes - crimes in which there is unlikely to be a
complaining victim to go to the police to offer specific and reliable
information for an accurate warrant. Drug laws, which prohibit adults
from ingesting certain substances, are one example.

Neither the buyer nor the seller of drugs is likely to complain to
the police, even if a transaction goes sour. A user of illicit drugs
is unlikely to call the police and say, "Hey, there are illicit drugs
in my apartment." To get evidence to prosecute, these laws police
have turned to increasingly intrusive methods of getting into
otherwise private places and surprising people. Therefore the
constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures
has been progressively weakened.

In the Hudson case, the police, who did have a warrant, waited only
three to five seconds before entering Booker T. Hudson's apartment
and finding cocaine and a gun. The courts who reviewed the case
agreed it violated the "knock-and-announce" rule and was
unconstitutional, but the appellate court in Michigan ruled that
excluding the evidence was too severe a penalty for a minor
infraction and allowed the evidence, leading to Mr. Hudson's
conviction. A deeply divided 5-4 Supreme Court, in an opinion written
by Justice Antonin Scalia, affirmed that decision.

The decision could mean, in effect, that every search warrant becomes
a "no-knock" warrant.

Since drug raids are often based on confidential informants whose
reliability can be dicey, this decision is likely to lead to more
military-style policing and more "wrong-door" raids on innocent
people. It is wrong-headed and potentially tragic.