What-cha Got There? Part 5

The US Supreme Court has rejected the legal principle that evidence obtained in violation of the so-called knock-and-announce rule must be excluded from use at a trial. The Supreme Court said in a 5-to-4 decision that this evidence can be used at trial. The social costs of excluding evidence because of a violation of the knock-and-announce rule are considerable, the Supreme Court said. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority that "Resort to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt is unjustified," This decision marks a rejection in the context of “knock-and-announce”. This principle is noted as a basic safeguard in the criminal justice system to protect the people. Its establishment in the 1960s by the high court adopted the approach that violations of certain procedural requirements by law enforcement officials could carry the heavy penalty of exclusion of evidence from use at a trial. This court was not the first to make this claim. Similar opinions and laws are dated back to the 1600’s in Britain. The power of this decision rocks the fundamental safeguard created an incentive for police officers to not only know the law, but to scrupulously follow it while carrying out their criminal investigations. Justice Breyer writes in a dissenting opinion "The court destroys the strongest legal incentive to comply with the Constitution's knock-and-announce requirement.” He continues that he could find no legal precedent supporting the high court's ruling in any of the Fourth Amendment privacy cases decided since 1914. "It represents a significant departure from the court's precedents,” The dissenting opinion even claims that this decision "weakens, perhaps destroys, much of the practical value of the Constitution's knock-and-announce protection."