ANOTHER OOPS FROM COPS?

MARCH 4, 2002 -- Dan Unis and his family were sitting around the supper
table one August evening a year and a half ago when masked, helmeted,
uniformed men broke into their Pueblo, Colo., home, shouted profanities,
kicked the family dog and leveled their assault rifles. All in a day's
work, it seems, for agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration
and Colorado Bureau of Investigation. No drugs, weapons or contraband were
found in the social worker's home, but Unis' 19- and 22-year-old sons were
carted off anyway and wound up spending the next two days in the county
jail. They weren't charged with any crime and were released without
explanation or apology.

That's how the Unis family tells the saga in a lawsuit filed in U.S.
District Court in Denver.

The authorities' version of that day's events? They're not talking.

"The government agents had no search warrant, no arrest warrant and no
lawful authority," said Mark Silverstein of the American Civil Liberties
Union in Denver; the advocacy group filed the lawsuit on the Unis family's
behalf.

"This is an example of the war on drugs missing the target and making a
direct hit on the Constitution," Silverstein said. He also notes he was
unable to obtain any kind of explanation not only from the two agencies
involved in the raid but also from the El Paso County jail or Pueblo police.

"In my time at the ACLU of Colorado, I have not come across a more flagrant
disregard for the principles of the Fourth Amendment, which forbids
unreasonable searches and seizures without probable cause," he said.

Though Silverstein may not have encountered a more blatant instance, such
incidents in general are hardly uncommon in America's costly, bloody war on
drugs. Like the case of Ismael Mena, who was shot and killed by police in a
1999 raid after they barged into his Denver home in search of drugs; it
turned out they had the wrong address.

Was the raid on the Unises simply a case of mistaken identity, as well?
Again, authorities aren't saying.

People, even highly competent ones, make mistakes. Law officers are no
exceptions. Of course, their mistakes have a higher potential to be lethal,
given the nature of their work.

The drug war in particular invites such troubling and tragic incidents.
However often cops on television crime dramas may kick in the door of an
apartment or surround and then storm a house, it really happens fairly
infrequently in the real world - except when it comes to the drug war.
That's because authorities hope to find the evidence before someone flushes
it down the toilet or in some other way disposes of it. Which is also why,
when things go wrong, they can go very wrong.

Yet, the drug war sputters on with no victory in sight. Indeed, one of its
few direct hits seems to have landed on the Bill of Rights.