St. Louis Bans No-Knock Warrants
By: Mike Maharrey
A CITY USES NULLIFICATION!!
ST. LOUIS, Mo. (June 22, 2022) – Last week, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones signed an executive order banning no-knock warrants. The ban takes a step toward nullifying several Supreme Court opinions in practice and effect.
Mayor Jones signed the executive order on June 15. Under the new policy, “No police officer, or any public safety official acting under the authority of the City of St. Louis, Missouri, shall seek, execute, or participate in the execution of a no-knock search warrant at any location within the boundaries of the City of St. Louis, Missouri.” The order also prohibits St. Louis police from asking law enforcement agents outside of the city to execute no-knock warrants on their behalf.
Under the policy, officers must “announce audibly that they have a police search warrant at least three times” before entering a residence on the basis of a warrant.
The policy does open the door for police to enter without announcing in “emergency” situations.
“Nothing in this order shall be construed to limit the ability of SLMPD to respond to immediate life safety incidents with appropriate protocols.”
Nullifying the Supreme Court
The implementation of this new policy in St. Louis will take a big step toward effectively nullifying and making irrelevant several Supreme Court opinions that give police across the U.S. legal cover for conducting no-knock raids.
In the 1995 case Wilson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court established that police must peacefully knock, announce their presence, and allow time for the occupants to open the door before entering a home to serve a warrant. But the Court allowed for “exigent circumstance” exceptions if police fear violence, if the suspect is a flight risk, or if officers fear the suspect will destroy evidence.
As journalist Radley Balko notes, police utilized this exception to the fullest extent, “simply declaring in search warrant affidavits that all drug dealers are a threat to dispose of evidence, flee or assault the officers at the door.”
The SCOTUS eliminated this blanket exception in Richards v. Wisconsin (1997) requiring police to show why a specific individual is a threat to dispose of evidence, commit an act of violence or flee from police. But even with the opinion, the bar for obtaining a no-knock warrant remains low.
“In order to justify a ‘no-knock’ entry, the police must have a reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing their presence, under the particular circumstances, would be dangerous or futile, or that it would inhibit the effective investigation of the crime by, for example, allowing the destruction of evidence.” [Emphasis added]
Reasonable suspicion is an extremely low legal bar to meet. Through this exception, police can justify no-knock entry on any warrant application. In effect, the parameters in the SCOTUS ruling make no-knock the norm instead of the exception.
A third Supreme Court ruling effectively eliminated the consequences for violating the “knock and announce” requirement even without a no-knock warrant. In Hudson v. Michigan (2006), the High Court held that evidence seized in violation of knock and announce was not subject to the exclusionary rule. In other words, police could still use the evidence in court even though they technically gathered it illegally.
Significantly, were it not for the dubious “incorporation doctrine” made up by the Supreme Court based on the 14th Amendment that purportedly empowers the federal government to apply the Bill of Rights to the states, these cases would have never gone to federal court and we wouldn’t have these blanket rules.
Without specific restrictions at the state or local level, police officers generally operate within the parameters set by the High Court. By passing restrictions on no-knock warrants, states set standards that go beyond the Supreme Court limits and in effect, nullify the SCOTUS opinion.
