Supremes to Victims of Wrong House Searches: Deal With It
Radley Balko | May 22, 2007, 8:06am
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the police can break into your home, rouse you from sleep, hold you naked at gunpoint, and—even if you're completely innocent—you have no recourse, so long as the warrant was valid.
It was an 8-1 decision.
"Valid warrants will issue to search the innocent and people like Rettele and Sadler unfortunately bear the cost," the justices said in the unsigned opinion. "The resulting frustration, embarrassment and humiliation may be real, as was true here. When officers execute a valid warrant and act in a reasonable manner to protect themselves from harm, however, the 4th Amendment is not violated," the court concluded.
The police apparently didn't know that the suspects they were after no longer lived at the residence, and didn't bother to check to see that the house had been recently purchased by new owners several months earlier. The new owners were white. The suspects the police were looking for were black. And they were wanted not on charges related to violent crime, but for identity fraud.
The Hudson case basically gave police carte blanche to violate the knock-and-announce rule without having to worry about application of the exclusionary rule. This case says that innocent civilians should have to bear the humiliating, terrifying, and possibly dangerous costs of mistakes made by agents of the state. It's a horrible ruling.
This case wasn't a forced-entry raid; the couple's son let the police into the home. But given the wording of the opinion and the 8-1 vote, it will almost certainly encourage city and state governments to fight suits stemming from wrong door raids in the future, instead of settling with victims.
Neither ruling is consistent with a society that allegedly values individual rights, even without the express protections offered by the Fourth Amendment. This ruling in particular evokes Justice Scalia's flp aside in Hudson that the only purpose of requiring the police to give notice is to avoid the harm of "being seen in one's night clothes." That the Supreme Court can continue to issue rulings like this one in spite of the Fourth Amendment shows that the Castle Doctrine, freedom from unreasonable search, and privacy in general are all but dead in this country.
Seems to me, not only should the state not be given immunity, the legal principle of res ipsa loquitur ought to apply in these cases. I can't think of a more unreasonable search than for an innocent couple to be startled from sleep by armed men, then forced to stand naked in front of them while the police rifle through their belongings, trying to figure out if they got the right house. That, by definition, ought to be unreasonable. And the victims should be compensated. Both because they were genuinely harmed, and and as a deterrent to encourage the police to practice due diligence in future searches.
Xrlq | May 22, 2007, 10:53am | #
I'm not sure whether this particular search was or wasn't reasonable. As others have noted, the fact (assuming it is a fact) that the recorded title to the house wasn't in the suspects' name is hardly dispositive; they were suspected identity thieves, for chrissake. Nor does the fact that they happened to be naked at the time the cops arrived - should all suspects get a pass that way? As to the fact that they were the wrong race, I guess that matters if the original suspects were strongly believed to have acted alone and not as part of a larger ring, but given the prevalance of fraud
rings, and the relative dearth of fraud rings that are exclusive as to race, that seems like a bit of a stretch, as well.
Radley's main issue appears to be with the fact that the couple was in fact innocent. Sorry, but the Fourth Amendment doesn't protect against that. To argue, in effect, that an otherwise reasonable search is
per se unreasonable because the target of the search turned out to be innocent is every bit as irrational, and for exactly the same reason, as arguing that an otherwise unreasonable search is
per se reasonable because the target of the search turned out to be guilty.
As others have noted already, this discussion has nothign to do with the doctrine of
res ipsa loquitur. It does, however, have something to do with another legal doctrine,
damnum absque injuria, which translates literally into "damage without injury," or roughly as "too damned bad." You can't recover for everything bad that happens to you. You can only recover when you can show that the other guy did something bad.
Gray Ghost | May 22, 2007, 12:06pm | #
No, media, Russ R. has posted here before, and he's not Dan T.
One problem here is that the cops wouldn't let the homeowners get dressed before conducting the search. I'm trying to figure why the police wouldn't allow them to get dressed, on a warrant to find two people.
On a drug warrant or computer warrant, I can see the logic of needing to prevent the destuction of evidence. I think that risk is overstated by the police and used to excuse thuggish behavior, but I acknowledge the risk exists. This was a warrant to find two people. Where's the problem in knocking on the bedroom door, saying in a cop voice, "Police. Search warrant. Are you decent? If not, throw some clothes on." and giving the homeowners 45 seconds to throw a robe on? Sure, handcuff them if you need to, I can see that. Hands kill. But let them get some clothes on first. In short, treating the homeowners as citizens and not subjects.
You can't hide two people in 45 seconds. If the home's surrounded, where are they going to run? Sure, the homeowners can grab a weapon in that time, but who's going to shoot it out over an identity theft charge? Did the people the police wanted have a history of violence? Does that even matter anymore on how a warrant is served? The Supreme Court disagrees with me, but holding naked people at gunpoint in their own home on an arrest warrant for a non-violent crime, is an unreasonable search. I don't see how that could be controversial.
The problem most of us ordinary people have with this case is that it looks like the police feel justified in mitigating every possible risk to their safety, even minute ones, no matter the effect on the people they serve. It doesn't matter to the police if you're handcuffed naked at gunpoint. It doesn't matter if they're rude to you. It doesn't matter if your things are damaged during their search. Your goodwill means less than zero to the police, if you're not part of the ruling class. Thank you mediageek for your comment reminding us that the police are citizens as well. The idea they are not, goes some way towards explaining some of the tension between citizens and those of us we employ to serve and protect.
Does anyone think that a warrant would be served this way on anyone politically connected in their jurisdiction? The sad thing pragmatically, not even looking at it from a civil liberties point of view, is that this is bad police work. I have police in my family as well as several family friends. Much of their effectiveness, they tell me, comes from help by "concerned citizens," tips mostly. How helpful do you think these people are going to be to the police now? Or their friends and relatives? All of which could have been defused by some good diplomatic thoughtful police work.
Agree with the idea expressed above that the reason our 4th Amendment jurisprudence is so abstract, Kafkaesque and perverse is that judges never have to experience the sharp end of the executive branch themselves. Their houses will not be condemmed for "economic re-development" and they will not be handcuffed naked, as armed men march through their home in the morning. And until that happens, nothing will change.
this is really too long already, but arguments about who owned the house and failure to determine how fresh the evidence for probable cause was, go to whether the warrant should have been issued in the first place. I've no idea why plaintiffs didn't attack the sufficiency of the warrant to begin with. Again, with an independent judiciary, warrants would issue on better evidence than this. I don't know how to change that.
