Recent events have put a particular type of warrant in the news.
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. . . On Wednesday, Acevedo released parts of the search warrant that allowed for the raid. According to the affidavit, the narcotics squad had been investigating the house for two weeks when they enlisted a confidential informant to go into the house and attempt to buy drugs (Acevedo said at a press conference Thursday that police received a tip earlier in January from an anonymous caller, who said her daughter had been inside the house doing heroin and that there were guns inside). At that point investigators did not know the names of anyone who lived inside the house, only that there was a man inside who looked to be around 55 years old. On Sunday, the officers met with the informant, gave him some money, and sent him inside the house to try to buy drugs. He returned with “brown powder” that later tested positive for heroin.
According to the affidavit, the informant said he bought the powder from the middle-aged man, who called it “boy,” a street name for heroin. The informant also said that the man carried a gun, and that there was more of the brown powder at the house, “packaged in a large quantity of plastic baggies.” The author of the affidavit wrote that the informant had “proven to be credible and reliable on many prior occasions” and he asked a municipal court judge “to enter the suspected place and premises without first knocking and announcing the presence and purpose of the officers executing the warrant.” As probable cause for the no-knock raid, the investigator wrote that because there was heroin inside and the man there was armed, it was reasonable to believe that the suspect would use the gun to defend himself or to buy time to destroy the drugs if he knew beforehand that police were going to enter the house. The order was signed at 1:30 p.m. on Monday. Within three and a half hours police had arrived at the house, armed and ready.
. . . The Fourth Amendment protects against unannounced searches, except when law enforcement can show beforehand that there is a risk of violence or the destruction of evidence. Judges in Texas typically approve warrants for no-knock raids, and the tactic is frequently employed by police departments across the country, with mixed results. According to a 2014 ACLU study of twenty police departments, “no-knock warrants were used (or probably used) in about 60 percent of the incidents in which SWAT teams were searching for drugs, even though many resulted in the SWAT team finding no drugs or small quantities of drugs.” Many no-knock searches yield only enough drugs to charge suspects with misdemeanors, according to a 2017 New York Times investigation.
It’s a dangerous tactic. The Times found that between 2010 and 2016, 31 civilians and eight officers died during no-knock raids, while “scores of others were maimed or wounded.” The most notorious no-knock raid left a seven-year-old girl, Aiyana Jones, dead in Detroit in 2011. The ACLU’s 2014 report found that 42 percent of the subjects of SWAT search warrant raids were black and 12 percent were Hispanic. The Times also found that in some of the searches in which an officer was killed, “suspects with no history of violence, found with small quantities of drugs, have wound up facing capital murder charges, and possible death sentences.”
For more:
- Execution of Warrants.
- Cops do 20,000 no-knock raids a year. Civilians often pay the price when they go wrong.
- No-knock warrant.
Worth a look, from Wikipedia:
English common law has required law enforcement to knock-and-announce since at least Semayne's case (1604), and in Miller v. United States (1958), the Supreme Court of the United States recognized that police must give notice before making a forced entry.[1] In the U.S. federal criminal law, the rule generally requiring knock-and-announce is codified at 18 U.S.C § 3109.
However, in Wilson v. Arkansas (1995) the Court created an exception to prevent the destruction of evidence and in Hudson v. Michigan (2006) the Court, by a 5-4 vote, held the exclusionary rule does not require the suppression of evidence police seize during an illegal forced entry
