According to Scalia's majority opinion, the police did announce themselves and then opened the unlocked door after a three or four second wait.
The common law rule was that the police had to announce themselves and then wait for the inhabitants to open the door. I don't know about you, but everybody I've ever visited would not even know someone was at the door if you just yelled something outside the door, especially if they're in the back of the house or with the TV or stereo on or the water running.
Your idea, that this will help keep evidence from being destroyed was already answered years ago, when an exception was carved out for cases where there was reasonable suspicion that evidence would be destroyed.
>> The common-law principle that law enforcement officers must announce their presence and provide residents an opportunity to open the door is an ancient one. See Wilson v. Arkansas, 514 U. S. 927, 931–932 (1995) . Since 1917, when Congress passed the Espionage Act, this traditional protection has been part of federal statutory law, see 40 Stat. 229, and is currently codified at 18 U. S. C. §3109. We applied that statute in Miller v. United States, 357 U. S. 301 (1958) , and again in Sabbath v. United States, 391 U. S. 585 (1968) . Finally, in Wilson, we were asked whether the rule was also a command of the Fourth Amendment . Tracing its origins in our English legal heritage, 514 U. S., at 931–936, we concluded that it was.
We recognized that the new constitutional rule we had announced is not easily applied. Wilson and cases following it have noted the many situations in which it is not necessary to knock and announce. It is not necessary when “circumstances presen[t] a threat of physical violence,” or if there is “reason to believe that evidence would likely be destroyed if advance notice were given,” id., at 936, or if knocking and announcing would be “futile,” Richards v. Wisconsin, 520 U. S. 385, 394 (1997) . We require only that police “have a reasonable suspicion … under the particular circumstances” that one of these grounds for failing to knock and announce exists, and we have acknowledged that “[t]his showing is not high.” Ibid.
law.cornell.edu
So, it's still a violation of the Constitution to barge in without knocking or waiting for the inhabitant to open the door, but the remedy will be something other than excluding the evidence. If you can think of a remedy that will be sufficient to deter police violating the common law rule, let me know. |
