In United States vs. Banks, a unanimous Court decided that preserving the evidence needed to convict people suspected of nonviolent, consensual drug crimes was more important than protecting innocent people from the violence of a paramilitary-style raid. Thirty years after it began, the modern drug war had finally killed the Castle Doctrine.
Next up the 2006 case Hudson vs. Michigan, in which the Supreme Court effectively erased its own recognition of the knock-and-announce requirement ten years earlier. By a 6-3 vote, the Court decided that even when police conduct a clearly illegal no-knock raid, any illegal evidence they seize can still be used against the defendant at trial…
…The Court wasn’t finished. In 2011, another 8-1 vote found that police officers may forcibly enter a home without a warrant if exigent circumstances exist even if police create those exigent circumstances themselves. In the case before the Court, an informant had conducted a cocaine buy while working for police in Lexington, Kentucky. The police then followed their suspect into an apartment complex, at which point they lost him. They claimed, however, that while they were there they spelled marijuana coming from an unrelated apartment. They knocked, and when they heard “rustling” from inside, kicked down the door. Inside, they found marijuana and cocaine. The Kentucky Supreme Court threw out the conviction, writing that in this case “police have created their own exigency, and cannot rely on the fear of evidence being destroyed as a justification for a warrantless entry.”
The US Supreme Court disagreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito found that so long as the police conduct itself is lawful before the exigent circumstances manifest, the subsequent search is legal.
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