Supreme Court eases restraints on searches

WASHINGTON – The Constitution does not require the government to forfeit evidence gathered through illegal “no-knock” searches, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday, in a far-reaching ruling that could encourage police with search warrants to conduct more aggressive raids.

The 5-to-4 decision broke with the court’s modern tradition of enforcing constitutional limitations on police investigations by keeping improperly obtained evidence out of court. The “exclusionary rule” has been imposed to protect a series of rights, such as the right to remain silent in police custody and the right against warrantless searches.

But the majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, and joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, suggested that the nation has moved into a new era of improved policing in which this rule may no longer be justified.

The ruling underscored the court’s rightward shift since Alito replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who seemed to disagree with Scalia about the case while she was still on the court.

At issue in Thursday’s case, Hudson v. Michigan, was the “knock and announce” rule, which has deep roots in Anglo-American law.

Before the decision, the police in most jurisdictions had to worry that they might lose a case if they did not first knock on the door, announce themselves, and then wait a reasonable time for a response before forcing their way in to execute a search warrant.

Now, unless state law says otherwise, the most they would face is a lawsuit for damages or administrative discipline.

Civil liberties groups and defense lawyers had argued to the court that those deterrents are far too weak to enforce the “knock and announce rule,” which, they argue, is often all that stands between an innocent citizen and an errant SWAT team.

That position was urged on the Supreme Court by attorneys for Booker T. Hudson Jr., a Michigan man convicted of drug possession after police found crack cocaine in his pockets during a 1998 no-knock raid the state admitted was unlawful.

But Michigan’s Supreme Court was one of the few lower courts to reject an exclusionary rule for “knock and announce” violations. Hudson’s conviction was upheld, and he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But Scalia’s opinion focused on the guilty defendants who go free when otherwise valid evidence is thrown out of court. He concluded the “social cost” is too high in relation to any additional privacy protection homeowners get from the “knock and announce” rule.