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When Cops Don't Need a Warrant To Crash Through Your Door
Reason ^ | July 31, 2013 | J.D. Tuccille

Posted on 08/05/2013 6:15:09 AM PDT by bamahead

The Fourth Amendment protects us from random invasions of our homes by police, right? We know we're secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects" unless the cops demonstrate probable cause to a judge and get a warrant. Except... Except when they don't. The fact of the matter is that police have a lot of leeway to bust your door down and take a look around if they fear that waiting for a warrant could lead to loss of evidence or danger to people. Or lead to something, anyway. That end run around the Fourth Amendment is called "exigent circumstances," and nobody really seems to be sure where it starts and stops. Except for the police. They know it when they see it.

On July 17, a law enforcement task force including federal and local officers barged into the Sarasota, Florida home of Louise Goldsberry after a brief standoff. The officers, looking for a suspected child molester in Goldsberry's apartment complex, insisted that the nurse's frightened reaction to the sight of a stranger pointing a gun through her kitchen window was all the reason they needed to assume their target's presence. "I feel bad for her," U.S. Marshal Matt Wiggins told Sarasota Herald-Tribune columnist Tom Lyons. "But at the same time, I had to reasonably believe the bad guy was in her house based on what they were doing."

What Goldberry and her boyfriend were doing was cowering in the presence of armed invaders. But that really might be all that it takes.

-SNIP-

[S]trangely, the courts have been unable to provide officers with a useful definition of the term "exigent circumstances."

-SNIP-

"Not only is the definition of the term elusive, the number of situations that are deemed 'exigent' keeps expanding."

(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Extended News; Government
KEYWORDS: 4thamendment; donutwatch; govtabuse; homeinvasion; policeinvasion; policestate; rapeofliberty; sarasota; searchwarrant; swat; swatabuse; tyranny; warrant; warriorcops
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1 posted on 08/05/2013 6:15:09 AM PDT by bamahead
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To: neverdem; Abathar; Abcdefg; Abram; Abundy; albertp; Alexander Rubin; Allosaurs_r_us; amchugh; ...
Fourth Amendment notwithstanding, we really do live in a world where screaming when an unidentifiable police officer points a gun at you through your window may be all it takes to authorize knocking your door off its hinges and dragging you outside in handcuffs.



Libertarian ping! Click here to get added or here to be removed or post a message here!

2 posted on 08/05/2013 6:16:39 AM PDT by bamahead (Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master. -- Sallust)
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To: bamahead

The 4th Amendment will become the vehicle by which armed Federal thugs will exterminate a few million political dissidents.

I, for one, am beginning to believe my death will be at the hands of a Federal government thug for simply being a Conservative.

When a Federal government agency openly calls for the monitoring and arrest of Christians, conservatives, gun owners, and patriots, you have to know your time on this Earth is being counted.


3 posted on 08/05/2013 6:26:42 AM PDT by rarestia (It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)
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To: rarestia

obamaworld: Constitution???? We don’t need no steenkin’ Constitution!


4 posted on 08/05/2013 6:32:40 AM PDT by hal ogen (First Amendment or Reeducation Camp?)
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To: rarestia

Same. But I hope I take some with me if I end up with a warrantless invasion of thugs with badges.


5 posted on 08/05/2013 6:35:12 AM PDT by Crazieman (Are you naive enough to think VOTING will fix this entrenched system?)
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To: bamahead

There was some ruling when the lower court ruled that if police offices saw two guys fighting with knives in a picture window, they still had to ask for a search warrant to enter. The higher court said that was ridiculous and overturned it.


6 posted on 08/05/2013 6:43:56 AM PDT by proxy_user
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To: rarestia

Police activity in my neighborhood the other night had me concerned.

I know how to kill a bad guy intruder.

But what if the cops break in?


7 posted on 08/05/2013 6:49:43 AM PDT by Uncle Miltie (Where's my pressure cooker backpack wmd ricin laced al qaeda terrorist BASSELOPE?)
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To: Uncle Miltie

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and crashes thru your window like a duck without announcing a search warrant, it’s a duck.


8 posted on 08/05/2013 6:54:11 AM PDT by ctdonath2 (Making good people helpless doesn't make bad people harmless.)
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To: Uncle Miltie

The police have been given carte blache to break down anyone’s door on suspicion of anything.

“Hey Boomer! That there house’s blinds done gone aflutterin’ when we look at ‘em. I bet they’re doin’ sumtin’ suspicious-like in there. We should go knock down that there door and check it out.”


9 posted on 08/05/2013 6:56:11 AM PDT by rarestia (It's time to water the Tree of Liberty.)
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To: rarestia
When a Federal government agency openly calls for the monitoring and arrest of Christians, conservatives, gun owners, and patriots, you have to know your time on this Earth is being counted.

Theirs is being counted now. The clock is ticking.

10 posted on 08/05/2013 7:01:31 AM PDT by unixfox (Abolish Slavery, Repeal the 16th Amendment)
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To: bamahead
Not only is the definition of the term elusive, the number of situations that are deemed 'exigent' keeps expanding

Maybe that's because the government first perverted the term 'public' from meaning OWNED by the public to 'anywhere a member of the public can go'.

11 posted on 08/05/2013 7:15:19 AM PDT by MamaTexan (I am a Person as defined by the Law of Nature, not a 'person' as defined by the laws of Man)
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To: hal ogen
obamaworld: Constitution???? We don’t need no steenkin’ Constitution!

I dislike Obama as much as anyone but this crap has been going on for years under both republican and democrat administrations
12 posted on 08/05/2013 7:18:15 AM PDT by slumber1 (My real name is Rusty Shackleford)
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To: Uncle Miltie

Don’t be the first to die.


13 posted on 08/05/2013 7:38:46 AM PDT by G Larry (Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Psalms 109:8)
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To: Uncle Miltie
>>I know how to kill a bad guy intruder. But what if the cops break in?<<

If in your sleep state you are jostled out of bed, cobwebs in your head and you grab your 9mm.....your wife will likely be arranging a funeral or weeping by your bedside.

14 posted on 08/05/2013 7:41:35 AM PDT by servantboy777
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To: rarestia
The thought you conveyed in your second sentence is correct. The only thing in question will be how you die: [a] From a Federalized member of your local police. or [b] starved ,worked, and beaten to death by Obama's goons in one of his camps while bastards like Hillary tour said camp and laugh at you. Like Himmler did the Jews in Hitler's camps.

That is the choice you will be left with all too soon down the road.

15 posted on 08/05/2013 7:51:03 AM PDT by sport
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To: bamahead

People ask “how on earth did the holocaust happen..?”

That question is being very silly.


16 posted on 08/05/2013 8:05:40 AM PDT by gaijin
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To: proxy_user
There was some ruling when the lower court ruled that if police offices saw two guys fighting with knives in a picture window, they still had to ask for a search warrant to enter. The higher court said that was ridiculous and overturned it.

That's because the higher courts are (a) idiots or (b) involved in the degradation of the Constitution.

The NSA's crap would never fly if they had the slightest respect for the fourth amendment, so I'm inclined to say the latter. (Besides, the police have no obligation to protect any private citizen, why should such protection apply, circumventing the 4th, because they wish it?)

17 posted on 08/05/2013 8:06:25 AM PDT by OneWingedShark (Q: Why am I here? A: To do Justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God.)
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To: Uncle Miltie

“I know how to kill a bad guy intruder.

But what if the cops break in?”


Same response! Someone breaks in, shoot, shoot straight, shoot often, reload, shoot again.


18 posted on 08/05/2013 8:07:50 AM PDT by Wurlitzer (Nothing says "ignorance" like Islam! 969)
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To: rarestia

As is documented throughout history, a police state has declared war on people like us who oppose an incipient tyranny.

They are hoping we don’t understand it and reciprocate.

If every conservative had the balls to die defending against such raids with deadly force, it would stop.

But most, in the moment, after all the training and prepping, acquiesce to save their hides.

We don’t really take seriously the Constitution we live by, the power it gives us, and what it will take individually to stand against this with any hope of success: we’re still too comfortable, too naive, too trusting, too scared.

Declared or not, they know they’re at war with us, but we still refuse to believe it. Until we do, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights is mere paper.


19 posted on 08/05/2013 8:10:27 AM PDT by dagogo redux (A whiff of primitive spirits in the air, harbingers of an impending descent into the feral.)
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To: sport
The thought you conveyed in your second sentence is correct. The only thing in question will be how you die: [a] From a Federalized member of your local police. or [b] starved ,worked, and beaten to death by Obama's goons in one of his camps while bastards like Hillary tour said camp and laugh at you. Like Himmler did the Jews in Hitler's camps.

There's a third choice:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

20 posted on 08/05/2013 8:10:30 AM PDT by OneWingedShark (Q: Why am I here? A: To do Justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God.)
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