The stormtroopers own your castle

Government invaders costumed in paramilitary gear broke into the home of Rita Patterson and William Hanavan on Saturday looking for a drug suspect and narcotics, reports The Buffalo News. Police left the premises without finding any drugs or arresting anyone, but not before terrorizing an innocent family and executing their two dogs "for no reason at all," said 68-year-old Daniel Patterson, who lives with his daughter.

Rita Patterson said she was cooking dinner in the kitchen when she heard loud noises at the side door. Hanavan was upstairs taking a nap, and at first she thought he may have fallen out of bed.

Before she knew what was happening, police wearing masks and helmets and carrying automatic weapons had broken through the door. They tied her hands with a zip tie and put her on the floor.

Her father pleaded with police not to shoot the dogs, but they wouldn’t allow him to grab the dogs and put them in another room, Patterson said.

One of the officers started firing a shotgun at the two dogs, one a pit bull and the other a pit bull-boxer mix.

One of the dogs was shot three times: once in the throat, once in the back and the last time in the leg while trying to run away, Rita Patterson said.

The other dog was cowering behind a table. Neither was a threat to the police, the residents said.

This atrocious behavior is the police state personified. The state's armed thugs have a legal right to trespass on our property brandishing weapons the rest of us aren't even allowed to own, use them in manners that would get private citizens thrown in jail, and are under no obligation to insure their information is even accurate before engaging in tactics that put the lives of law-abiding citizens at risk.

As abhorrent as it was that this family's pets were killed before their eyes, just imagine what might have happened had Hanavan or the Pattersons had the audacity to defend their home and dogs from these terrorists. One unfortunately need not engage in much speculation given that the precedent has already been set.

In the 1995 case Wilson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment required police to knock and announce themselves before entering a private home -- a decision intended to protect not only innocent suspects but also police, who could be mistaken by homeowners for criminal intruders (those not protected by government-issued guns and badges, that is). However, the exceptions the court allowed have set into motion widespread and unbridled assaults on our civil liberties that have manifested themselves in the "war on substances the state would rather you not ingest." As Radley Balko explained in Slate Magazine:

But Wilson didn't eliminate no-knocks. In [its] decision, the court recognized three broad exceptions, called "exigent circumstances," to the announcement requirement. The most pertinent of these state that if police believe announcing themselves before entering would present a threat to officer safety, or if they believe a suspect is particularly likely to destroy evidence, they may enter a home without first announcing their presence.

A legal no-knock raid, then, can happen in one of two ways. Police can make the case for exigent circumstances to a judge, who then issues a no-knock warrant; or police can determine at the scene that the exigent circumstances exist and make the call for a no-knock raid on the spot. In the latter case, courts will determine after the fact if the raid was legal.

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that allowing police to determine for themselves the circumstances justifying no-knock entry essentially invalidates any requirement to approach a judge beforehand. After all, the state is the ultimate judge in conflicts involving itself, so the chances that it will rule against itself are between slim and none.

Balko's findings tend to support this assertion:

In the real world, the exigent-circumstances exceptions have been so broadly interpreted since Wilson, they've overwhelmed the rule. No-knock raids have been justified on the flimsiest of reasons, including that the suspect was a licensed, registered gun owner (NRA, take note!), or that the mere presence of indoor plumbing could be enough to trigger the "destruction of evidence" exception.

In fact, in many places the announcement requirement is now treated more like an antiquated ritual than compliance with a suspect's constitutional rights. In 1999, for example, the assistant police chief of El Monte, Calif., explained his department's preferred procedure to the Los Angeles Times: "We do bang on the door and make an announcement—'It's the police'—but it kind of runs together. If you're sitting on the couch, it would be difficult to get to the door before they knock it down."

Legalities aside, no one -- whether the private citizen or the government agent -- has a moral right to trespass on private property with the intent to initiate violence against nonviolent targets, much less carry out these threats by unilaterally inflicting damage to private property and harm on human beings.

Moreover, if you're inclined to excuse such tyrannical behavior even under select circumstances, consider the fact that when police kill innocent civilians during the course of these violent home invasions, they generally receive a paid vacation followed by an inevitable return to active duty; if you or I happen to kill a cop while attempting to defend ourselves from faceless assailants during the course of an immoral SWAT raid, we're looking at the death penalty or life behind bars.

Thus, the crux of the matter lies not with legality, but morality. Cory Maye is currently serving a life sentence even though there is no reason not to believe Maye when he said he acted in self-defense when he shot and killed Ron Jones during a drug raid in the middle of the night. Maye testified that police did not announce themselves, and that he ran to his daughter's room to ready a pistol in an attempt to protect himself and his little girl from harm that proved to be imminent. Though Maye said he believed the police were burglars, officers associated with the assault on Maye's person and property testified that they identified themselves as law enforcement officers, and Maye was ultimately convicted of murder.

Because we hold the concept of legality in higher regard than morality, Cory Maye is but one innocent man who may never spend time with his daughter as a free man again. However, morally it doesn't make one whit of difference whether Maye realized the intruders were police officers or not. Human beings who initiate lethal violence against other, nonviolent human beings deserve to be shot. It is the act of the offender that counts, not his attire.

We would be wise to consider the words of Will Grigg, who wrote in an article defending the right to self-defense:

Armed aggressors have no right to self-defense. An armed criminal has no right to shoot back if his victims offer armed resistance. That principle should apply to aggressors of any variety – including police who stage illegal and unnecessary home invasions, or who commit violent acts in the course of unlawful arrests.

It's more than a little ironic that the Supreme Court paid lip service to the "Castle Doctrine" when attempting to distinguish between police and criminal intruders in Wilson v. Arkansas: its decision in the case has guaranteed that the two are one and the same.