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Stories filed under: "no knock warrant"

DOJ Charges Officers For No Knock Warrant Lies That Led To The Killing Of Breonna Taylor

from the police-accountability dept

There are very few things that are more dangerous for citizens and cops than no-knock warrants. These warrants allow cops to raid houses without announcing themselves, leading those on the receiving end to assume they’re being invaded by armed criminals.

People who don’t know they’re dealing with cops defend themselves. Cops, who believe everyone should know they’re cops despite being allowed to enter unannounced, respond violently. People die. In some cases, cops die. And all that’s needed to allow cops to treat people as hostile combatants — even when they’ve been startled awake by armed intruders — is some boilerplate presented to a judge who’s also been roused from their slumber to sign off on some state-sanctioned violence.

Limitation of this power has been hit and miss. It’s usually prompted by a high profile killing that police can’t manage to cover up. More pressure to alter the rules of combat has been applied by other high profile killings by officers that didn’t involve no-knock warrants. The unilateral power to kill when officers willingly place themselves in danger has seen even more judicial and legislative scrutiny in recent months, but there’s still a whole lot of work to be done before cops stop considering themselves an unassailable blend of James Bond and the Punisher when engaging in warrant service.

The killing of Breonna Taylor by Louisville, Kentucky police has prompted reforms in Kentucky, as well as in nearby states. Seven officers stormed Taylor’s apartment, supposedly in search of Jamarcus Glover and Adrian Walker — both of whom were suspected of selling drugs out of a house located nearly 10 miles away from Taylor’s residence.

Officers executed the no-knock warrant On March 13, 2020. Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker (no relation to Adrian Walker) were awoken by the raid and assumed criminals were entering the house. Walker fired one shot at the intruders. The intruding cops fired 32 shots. None hit Walker but Breonna Taylor was hit by six bullets and died. Neither person in the house was a criminal suspect. And, while officers claimed they announced themselves, Walker stated he heard no announcement and the cops were in possession of a no-knock warrant.

The assault and attempted murder charges brought against Walker for firing a single warning shot (which struck an officer’s leg) were dismissed with prejudice a year later. One cop was fired for “firing blindly” through a covered window into the apartment. The city paid out a $12 million settlement to Taylor’s family. Later that year, the fired officer (Brett Hankinson) was indicted on wanton endangerment charges.

The fallout continues. The US Department of Justice has filed its own charges against some of the involved officers.

The federal charges announced today allege:

– that members of [LMPD’s] Place-Based Investigations Unit falsified the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant of Ms. Taylor’s home;

– that this act violated federal civil rights laws;

– and that those violations resulted in Ms. Taylor’s death.

Specifically, we allege that Ms. Taylor’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when defendants Joshua Jaynes, Kyle Meany, and Kelly Goodlett sought a warrant to search Ms. Taylor’s home knowing that the officers lacked probable cause for the search.

We allege that the defendants knew the affidavit in support of that warrant contained false and misleading information and that it omitted material information.

Among other things, the affidavit falsely claimed that officers had verified that the target of the alleged drug trafficking operation had received packages at Ms. Taylor’s address. In fact, Defendants Jaynes and Goodlett knew that was not true.

We further allege that Defendants Jaynes and Meany knew the search warrant would be carried out by armed LMPD officers, and that conducting that search could create a dangerous situation for anyone who happened to be in Ms. Taylor’s home.

In other words, cops lied. Several cops lied. These lies were presented to a judge who then gave them permission to perform a violent entry and respond violently when someone with a legally obtained gun responded to the unidentified violent threat he was faced with. The guy with the legal gun fired one shot. Cops responded with a hail of gunfire, killing a person who had done nothing more than be rudely awakened by the unexpected presence of people wielding weapons.

Lying on a warrant application is just regular police work, as defense attorney Scott Greenfield points out. It happens so often and so casually that a cop failing to add a few lies is probably considered incapable of handling affidavit paperwork.

Out of thousand of cases I’ve defended, I can count on less than one hand the number of times there was no lie told. The vast majority of times the lie is tangential, filling in a gap here or there that needs to appear filled for the sake of court but wasn’t deemed worthy of actual concern on the street. So the cops don’t know? They make it up. They fill in the blanks. They know what the right words are and say them.

Most of the time, the lies come after the fact, when the defendant has been busted, the contraband seized, the warm glow of knowing you framed the guilty filling the courtroom. The cops know it. The prosecutors know it. Even the judge knows it, and knows that without it, there were be a lot more work, more expense, more griping and fewer cases made. And it’s not as if the defendants aren’t guilty, right?

But every so often, the lies result in innocent people being killed. Cops consider this acceptable collateral damage. The public does not. Courts vary in their determinations. Sometimes lives are worth respecting. At other times, the deaths are just the unfortunate side effect of law enforcement work.

But the DOJ’s indictments send a message: cops who lie face the chance (however small) of being prosecuted for misleading their way into an unjustified killing. The odds still favor cops who don’t give a shit, but any reduction in the odds of getting away with it is something to be noted. Until the entire system starts treating police misconduct seriously, it’s probably best to hold our applause. But this is still an anomaly worth noting. Sometimes cops don’t get away with their lies. And if this means even a handful cops across the nation will think twice before loading up warrant applications with unjustified assertions, it may allow innocent people to avoid be killed in a hail of cop gunfire.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, breonna taylor, brett hankinson, doj, joshua jaynes, kelly goodlett, kenneth walker, kentucky, kyle meany, louisville, louisville metro police, no knock warrant, probable cause, search warrant

Minneapolis Limits No-Knock Warrants As Prosecutors Decide Cop Can’t Be Charged For Killing Amir Locke During A No-Knock Raid

from the cops-no-longer-able-to-create-the-danger-they-need-to-justify-killing-someone dept

On February 2, 2022, Minneapolis PD officers executed a no-knock raid on an apartment. Officer Mark Hanneman then summarily executed Amir Locke within seconds of his entry into the apartment.

The Minneapolis PD suggested Amir Locke had plenty of time to realize police officers were in the apartment. The body cam time stamps showed something completely different: officers making entry at 06:48:02 and Hanneman opening fire at 06:48:11.

It didn’t have to go this way. The Minneapolis PD was carrying out a warrant obtained by the St. Paul Police Department. The warrant obtained by the St. Paul PD was a regular warrant: one in which officers would have knocked and announced their presence. The Minneapolis PD decided it didn’t want to handle it that way and sought permission to perform a no-knock entry. When Locke reached for the weapon he legally owned, he was killed. Given the time stamps on the body cam recording, it would have been impossible for Locke to rouse himself from his sleep and be fully cognizant of the situation. The officers created the danger that allowed Officer Hanneman to kill Amir Locke.

But that’s the way the MPD does business. The Star Tribune reported that the MPD preferred to use no-knock warrants, even though those are supposed to be limited to extreme cases necessitating unannounced entry. According to the Star Tribune, since the beginning of 2022, the MPD had obtained 13 no-knock warrants and only 12 regular search warrants.

The MPD — which cannot seem to stop killing or steer clear of controversy — won’t have this option in the future. Or, at least, it won’t be able to maintain its absurdly high no-knock/regular warrant ratio.

The new policy prohibits Minneapolis police officers from applying for no-knock search warrants, which would allow them to enter a location without first knocking or announcing their presence. It also prohibits them from asking other agencies to “execute” a no-knock search warrant on their behalf, or executing them for other agencies.

There are, of course, exceptions to the new rule.

Officers can still apply for “knock and announce” search warrants — which would generally require them to wait 20 seconds before entering a location during daylight hours and 30 seconds before entering during nighttime hours (between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m.). Those requirements, however, can be waived if there are “exigent circumstances.” The city says officers may enter immediately “to prevent imminent harm or to provide emergency aid,” to prevent “imminent destruction or removal of evidence” (except narcotics), to prevent “imminent escape of a suspect” or when in “hot pursuit.”

So, not much of a change, really. This appears to be mostly how the MPD handled things before the policy change. The only thing that might limit the use of no-knock warrants in the future is the exemption of narcotics from the list of evidence that must be no-knocked to save from “immediate destruction and removal.” And, according to an MPD spokesperson, officers will still be able to make their own discretion to convert regular warrants to no-knock warrants during warrant service if they decide the unfolding situation can be described as exigent.

The more useful portion of the new policy requires the PD to develop and maintain a “public-facing, online dashboard” that tracks forced entries performed by officers, including no-knock warrants. This dashboard will include demographic info, time/date data, and whether or not officers deployed force against the residence or the residents.

Unfortunately, the Minneapolis PD won’t learn much from the Amir Locke tragedy. Officers seeking no-knock warrants may be slightly inconvenienced by the new rules governing no-knock warrants, but the policy, as written, doesn’t seem capable of deterring abuse of these warrants. And the officer who decided Amir Locke was a threat worth killing less than ten seconds after crossing the apartment threshold won’t be facing anything more than public damnation.

In a joint statement from the offices of Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the prosecutors noted that Locke “should be alive today, and his death is a tragedy,” but that “the state would be unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt any of the elements of MInnesota’s use-of-deadly force statute.”

Unfortunately, this is how the law works. The MPD raid team told itself (and a judge) the situation would be dangerous — dangerous enough to justify an unannounced entry. The moment officers saw a person with a gun in their hand, the killing was lawful. In essence, the PD had its cake and ate it, too. It created the danger and then exploited it. When cops create their own danger, the public loses 100% of time, as Scott Greenfield points out:

Officer Hanneman was not unreasonable in believing that the sleeping guy in an apartment being raided under a judicially authorized no-knock warrant presented an imminent risk of death, and so he shot first and killed him. This is what the law permits, making a choice favoring police over the non-cop when the decision is made whether to pull the trigger. This situation is untenable. The outcome is bad. What it was not is criminal.

If the new rules for no-knock warrants even slightly reduce the MPD’s use of them, it will save lives. And that’s worth it, even if it’s clear the new no-knock rules are mostly window dressing that look like reform but hardly change anything.

Filed Under: amir locke, mark hanneman, minneapolis, minneapolis pd, no knock raid, no knock warrant

Minneapolis Police Officers Demanded No-Knock Warrant, Killed Innocent Gunowner Nine Seconds After Entering Residence

from the maybe-just-don't-partner-with-the-MPD-from-now-on,-St.-Paul-PD dept

The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota is temporarily ending the use of no-knock warrants following the killing of 22-year-old Amir Locke by Minneapolis police officers. The city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, has placed a moratorium on these warrants until the policy can be reviewed by Professor Pete Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University and anti-police violence activist DeRay McKesson.

This comes as too little too late for Locke and his surviving family. The entire raid was caught on body cam and it shows Amir Locke picking up a gun (but not pointing it at officers) after he was awakened by police officers swarming into the residence.

Locke, who was not a target of the investigation, was sleeping in the downtown Minneapolis apartment of a relative when members of a Minneapolis police SWAT team burst in shortly before 7 a.m. Wednesday. Footage from one of the officers’ body cameras showed police quietly unlocking the apartment door with a key before barging inside, yelling “Search warrant!” as Locke lay under a blanket on the couch. An officer kicked the couch, Locke stirred and was shot by officer Mark Hanneman within seconds as Locke held a firearm in his right hand.

Locke was shot once in the wrist and twice in the chest. He died thirteen minutes after the shooting. As you may have noticed from the preceding paragraph, Locke was not a suspected criminal. And for those who may argue simply being within reach of a firearm is justification for shooting, Locke’s handgun was legal and he had a concealed carry permit. His justifiable reaction to people barging into an apartment unannounced is somehow considered less justifiable than the officers’ decision to kill him.

In most cases, that’s just the way it goes, which — assuming the warrant dotted all i’s and crossed all t’s — means the Second Amendment is subservient to other constitutional amendments, like the Fourth. Here’s how Scott Greenfield explains this omnipresent friction in a nation where the right to bear arms is respected… but only up to a point:

The Second Amendment issue is clear. Locke had a legal gun and, upon being awoken in the night, grabbed it. He didn’t point it at anyone or put his finger on the trigger, but it was in his hand. A cop might explain that it would only take a fraction of a second for that to change, if he was inclined to point it at an officer, put his finger on the trigger and shoot. But he didn’t.

This conundrum has been noted and argued before, that if there is a fundamental personal right to keep and bear arms, and that’s what the Supreme Court informs us is our right, then the exercise of that constitutional right cannot automatically give right to police to execute you for it. The Reasonably Scared Cop Rule cannot co-exist with the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

“Cannot co-exist.” This means that, in most cases, the citizen bearing arms generally ceases to exist (along with this right) when confronted by a law enforcement officer who believes they are reasonably afraid.

There’s another point to Greenfield’s post that’s worth reading, but one we won’t discuss further in this post: the NRA’s utter unwillingness to express outrage when the right to bear arms is converted to the right to remain permanently silent by police officers who have deliberately put themselves in a situation that maximizes their fears, no matter how unreasonable those fears might ultimately turn out to be.

But this is a situation that could have been avoided. A knock-and-announce warrant would have informed Locke (who was sleeping at a relative’s house) that law enforcement was outside. As the owner of a legal gun and conceal/carry permit, it’s highly unlikely this announcement would have resulted in Locke opening fire on officers.

It didn’t have to be this way, but the Minneapolis Police Department insisted this couldn’t be handled any other way.

A law enforcement source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case, said that St. Paul police filed standard applications for search warrant affidavits for three separate apartments at the Bolero Flats Apartment Homes, at 1117 S. Marquette Av., earlier this week.

But Minneapolis police demanded that, if their officers were to execute the search within its jurisdiction, St. Paul police first secure “no-knock” warrants instead. MPD would not have agreed to execute the search otherwise, according to the law enforcement source.

If it had been handled the St. Paul way, Locke might still be alive. There’s no evidence here indicating deployment of a knock-and-announce warrant would have made things more dangerous for the officers. If this sort of heightened risk presented itself frequently, the St. Paul PD would respond accordingly when seeking warrants.

St. Paul police very rarely execute no-knock warrants because they are considered high-risk. St. Paul police have not served such a warrant since 2016, said department spokesman Steve Linders.

Contrast that with the Minneapolis PD, which appears to feel a majority of warrant service should be performed without niceties like knocking or announcing their presence.

A Star Tribune review of available court records found that MPD personnel have filed for, and obtained, at least 13 applications for no-knock or nighttime warrants since the start of the year — more than the 12 standard search warrants sought in that same span.

This is likely an undercount, the Star Tribune notes. Many warrants are filed under seal and are still inaccessible. But it does track with the MPD’s deployment stats. According to records, the MPD carries out an average of 139 no-knock warrants a year.

This happens despite Minnesota PD policy specifically stating officers are supposed to identify themselves as police and announce their purpose (i.e., “search warrant”) before entering. That rule applies even if officers have secured a no-knock warrant. If officers wish to bypass this policy that applies to no-knock warrants, they need more than a judge’s permission. They also need direct permission from the Chief of Police or their designee. That’s because no-knock warrants were severely restricted by police reforms passed in 2020. But it appears those reforms have done little to change the way the MPD handles its warrant business.

We’ll see if the mayor’s moratorium is more effective than the tepid reforms enacted following the killing of George Floyd by Officer Derek Chauvin. The undetectable change in tactics following the 2020 reforms doesn’t exactly give one confidence a citywide moratorium will keep MPD officers from showing up unannounced and killing people during the ensuing confusion. It only took nine seconds for officers to end Amir Locke’s life. Given what’s been observed here it will apparently take several years (and several lives) before the Minneapolis PD will be willing to alter its culture and its day-to-day practices.

Filed Under: amir locke, minneapolis, minnesota, no knock warrant, police, police shooting

Fatal Houston PD Drug Raid Apparently Predicated On Drugs A Cop Had Stashed In His Car

from the this-is-insane dept

The ugly Houston PD drug raid that resulted in four injured officers and two dead “suspects” just keeps getting uglier.

Officers swore a confidential informant purchased heroin from 59-year-old Dennis Tuttle in the house he shared with his wife of 21 years, Rhogena Nicholas. They swore the CI told them the house was filled with heroin packaged for purchase.

On the strength of this confidential informant’s claims, officers obtained a no-knock warrant and raided Tuttle’s house. The officers claimed Tuttle opened fire on them and that his wife tried to grab a shotgun from a downed officer. This was the supposed reason for SWAT team’s killing of Tuttle and Nicholas.

This was the narrative everyone was given. Not a single officer was wearing a body cam, despite the department possessing dozens of them. The only footage that survived — captured by a neighbor’s security camera — was confiscated by the Houston PD.

Even in this vacuum of information, the PD’s narrative quickly fell apart. No large amounts of heroin were found during the raid — just personal use quantities of heroin cocaine and marijuana. The inventory also included a few guns, which the PD has treated as inherent evidence of criminality despite the fact both Tuttle and his wife could legally own the weapons found in the house. The only criminal history either of them had was an old misdemeanor charge for a bad check.

Now that the PD’s investigation into this raid is underway, it’s becoming clear the official narrative — a daring no-knock raid that took out dangerous heroin dealers — isn’t going to survive. The new narrative already includes multiple lies by police officers and a lot of supporting evidence.

First off, the raid inventory does not include the weapon officers claimed Tuttle fired at them.

The other four items in the inventory are guns: a 20-gauge Beretta ALS shotgun, a 12-gauge Remington 1100 shotgun, a Remington 700 bolt-action rifle, and a .22-caliber Winchester 190 semi-automatic rifle. The list does not include the .357 Magnum revolver that police say Tuttle fired at the officers who broke into his home, shot his dog, and killed his wife.

It also doesn’t include the money the CI paid for the heroin or the weapon he claimed Tuttle was carrying.

Nor does it mention the 9mm semi-automatic handgun that the C.I. supposedly saw in the house the day before, which apparently disappeared along with the heroin and the money.

The PD also claimed the investigation was initiated by an anonymous call claiming the couple were selling drugs from their house. Since that initial press salvo by Chief Art Acevedo, information has come out indicating the “tip” was neither anonymous nor did it reference drug dealing.

A 911 call from the mother of now-deceased suspect Rhogena Nicholas put 7815 Harding Street on police radar. Sources close to the investigation say her mother called reporting the 58-year-old was doing drugs inside her own home.

It only gets worse. According to statements from officers now under investigation, it appears the Houston PD raided a house, shot a dog, and killed two people over drugs a police officer had stashed in his vehicle. (As is pointed out in the comments, the current version of the Chronicle’s article has reworded these two paragraphs slightly. Here’s a link to an archived version containing this pull quote.)

In the original warrant – the one used to justify the raid – [Officer Gerald] Goines wrote that he watched the buy and, along with Bryant, identified the substance as heroin. But when investigators went back to talk to [Officer Steven] Bryant, he admitted that he’d actually just retrieved two bags of heroin from the center console of Goines’ car, at the instruction of another officer.

Though he then took the two bags of drugs for testing to determine that they were heroin, he eventually admitted that he had never seen narcotics in question before retrieving them from the car. That, the investigator noted, contradicts the search warrant affidavit filed before the raid, which indicates that Bryant “recognized the substance purchased by the CI as heroin.”

This is absolutely terrifying. Investigators can’t seem to locate the informant both officers claimed was a reliable source of intel, which suggests this person — relied on in other Houston PD investigations — doesn’t even exist. None of the CIs interviewed by Houston investigators said they’d made the purchase detailed in the warrant affidavit.

How do citizens protect themselves against police officers willing to fabricate every aspect of an investigation in order to perform armed raids of their houses? Legally owning weapons means nothing when cops (and many courts) consider homeowners defending themselves from armed intruders a crime in and of itself. Two people are dead and no amount of late-arriving indictments is going to change that. Officers took a concerned mother’s call about her daughter’s drug use and turned it into a criminal conspiracy involving heroin and dangerous drug pushers armed to the teeth.

We have to grant law enforcement a massive amount of power in order for them to do their job. Time after time, they abuse the powers we’ve given them, wielding them like weapons against the same citizens they’re supposed to answer to. Vast power has been paired with nearly nonexistent accountability to create an atmosphere where officers feel comfortable manufacturing evidence to support their adrenaline habits. This should be nightmare fuel for all Americans. Unfortunately, outside of those already attuned to the miserable state of American policing, this will appear to be nothing more than a couple of bad apples they can safely ignore.

Filed Under: dennis tuttle, gerald goines, heroin, houston, houston pd, no knock warrant, police, rhogena nicholas, steven bryant, swat team

Grand Jury Somehow Fails To Indict Man Who Shot Deputy During No-Knock, Pre-Dawn Raid For Capital Murder

from the the-system-forgets-to-work dept

This originally was a story I only mentioned in passing while discussing the law enforcement community’s growing embrace of no-knock warrants.

On December 19, eight members of Texas’s Burleson County Sheriff’s Department banged open the door of the double-wide trailer rented by 28-year-old Henry Magee and his girlfriend. It was between five and six AM and the deputies, who were there to search for marijuana and stolen weapons, set off at least two flashbang grenades in an attempt to surprise and disorient Magee, their suspect. The leader of the team, Sergeant Adam Sowders, a seven-year veteran of the department, had requested the warrant be “no-knock,” meaning the police could enter the residence without announcing themselves. But it was possibly do to the confusion caused by the sudden entrance of the cops that led to Magee opening fire with a semi-automatic weapon and hitting Sowders. The cop later died, and Magee has been charged with capital murder, which can bring the death penalty in Texas.

A squad of officers smash through a person’s door (possibly unannounced) pre-dawn and are greeted by gunfire. The surprising thing is that this doesn’t happen more often, especially in a state like Texas, where a man’s home is often his well-armed castle. But the prosecutor didn’t see the deputy’s fault in this incident and pursued capital murder charges. Keep in mind, part of what was being sought in the raid was an ultra-dangerous drug that is currently legal in two states. Also keep in mind that the guns they found weren’t stolen, but because of the marijuana Magee possessed, the previously legal weapons were now illegal.

In a surprising decision, a Texas grand jury has decided not to indict Henry Magee on capital murder charges.

“This was a terrible tragedy that a deputy sheriff was killed, but Hank Magee believed that he and his pregnant girlfriend were being robbed,” Magee’s lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, told A.P. “He did what a lot of people would have done. He defended himself and his girlfriend and his home.”

DeGuerin, a well-known defense attorney who has been practicing for half a century, said “he could not immediately remember another example of a Texas grand jury declining to indict a defendant in the death of a law enforcement officer.”

The district attorney who pursued the capital murder charges against Magee even admitted the evidence against him wasn’t solid.

“I believe the evidence also shows that an announcement was made,” Renken said. “However, there is not enough evidence that Mr. Magee knew that day that Peace Officers were entering his home.”

Despite this lack of evidence, Julie Renken went ahead and pursued capital murder charges in front of a grand jury, an entity most notable for its willingness to “indict a ham sandwich.” The fact that Magee was able to walk away from that charge still remains the exception to the rule. As far as grand juries go, indicting is what they do best. They have it down to a science, as Gideon at A Public Defender points out.

During a single four-hour workday last week, a Mecklenburg County grand jury heard 276 cases and handed down 276 indictments.

That means the 18 jurors heard evidence, asked questions, weighed whether the charges merit a trial, then voted on the indictments – all at the average rate of one case every 52 seconds.

276 indictments, all in under a half-day. Not a single one of the 276 accused were found not guilty. This is the grand jury system running on all cylinders.

You read something like that and you just have to laugh. You have to laugh because it’s so improbable and so absurd that it must be true and that it can only happen here, in these United States of America, the best country in the world with the best justice system in the world, because by God, we hate criminals.

A grand jury rings up a 276-0 shutout in less time than it takes the average officer worker to get to their lunch break, but when people question whether a true justice system should be giving this much power to an entity that only hears one side of the case (the prosecution’s), the supporters point out the rarities, like the one above, that supposedly prove the system (and its 52-second indictments) works.

The biggest obstacle to curbing grand juries (much less eliminating them) is the government itself.

The appeal of the grand jury to the government is obvious: you get to present your allegations to a group of civilians who aren’t in any way equipped to determine the veracity of the charges and who are most likely to side with you.

If that description doesn’t seem too far removed from the rubber stamp of the FISA court with its non-adversarial approach, there’s a good reason for that. Political figures harness voters by vowing to be tough on crime — and there’s no greater crime than terrorism. The best way to pitch a shutout and satisfy constituents demanding a “safer” country/city/neighborhood is to remove the batter from the equation.

Filed Under: grand jury, no knock warrant, police abuse, texas

Drug Task Force Officer Denied Qualified Immunity For Violating Citizen's Rights With Illicitly-Obtained No-Knock Warrant

from the law-enforcement's-'get-out-of-jail-free'-card-just-took-a-hit dept

The law enforcement community and their love of no-knock warrants is starting to cost them. Multiple lawsuits have been filed over the past several years because of these tactics and just last month, a cop was shot dead by a homeowner defending himself against armed attackers who bashed in his door unannounced at 5:30 in the morning. The sick twist to that last incident is that the homeowner is now charged with capital murder, an offense that is punishable by death in Texas.

Now, another suit stemming from a no-knock warrant has gone badly for the law enforcement officer behind the raid. Michael Riley, an investigator for the Rensselaer County (NY) Drug and Gang Task Force is now facing the possibility of a jury trial, all without the safety net of qualified immunity. According to the 2nd Circuit Court’s opinion, this is how the no-knock raid went down.

On July 3, 2008, at approximately 6:00 a.m., McColley was awoken in her home by the sound of the City of Troy Police Department Emergency Response Team (‘ERT’) knocking down her door and the explosion of a flash-bang grenade. Dressed in all black, wearing face masks, and carrying automatic weapons, the members of the ERT screamed for McColley to get on the floor, but as there was not enough space for her to lie on the floor, a member of the ERT instead shoved McColley face down onto her bed. As she had been roused from sleep, McColley was clad in only a T-shirt and underwear. She repeatedly requested to cover herself but was repeatedly denied.

This raid in search of crack cocaine was based on a “confidential informant’s” statement that he had visited that particular address “twenty or thirty times” during the previous six months to make drug deals. The task force placed the house under surveillance to verify the informant’s claims but noted no drug-related activity. Riley then ran a background check on the house’s listed occupant, Ronita McColley, which came up clean. The report indicated she had no criminal background and, additionally noted that a child resided in the house with her.

Riley then acquired a no-knock warrant based solely on the informant’s unverified claims, omitting everything the task force had observed (that being “nothing”) ass well as the results of the background check. Judge Pooler dissembles exactly how Riley lied by omission to obtain this warrant.

For each of the search locations with the exception of McColley’s home, Riley identified the resident individual and described his or her ties to drug dealing and criminality. Riley never mentioned McColley’s identity, lack of criminal history, or even the fact that there was a resident who lived at 396 First Street—as opposed to the apartment being a location exclusively used by Stink in his drug dealing enterprise. In the warrant application, Riley also made no mention of the fact that surveillance had been conducted and yielded no evidence or even suspicion of narcotics or other criminal activity…

While it is indeed the case that where a warrant “does not report a prior conviction for a particular crime, the magistrate assumes for purposes of determining whether the government has carried its burden that no such conviction exists,” Walczyk, 496 F.3d at 161, the pertinent omission here was not merely McColley’s lack of criminal history. Rather, McColley herself was omitted entirely from the application. The issuing judge did not have the benefit of assuming that “no such conviction exist[ed]” because he was not informed that anyone other than Stink, who was the identified target of the drug investigation, resided in or maintained the first floor apartment at 396 First Street.

Riley, on the other hand, fully knew that McColley, an individual with no criminal history and no purported ties to the targets of the drug investigation, lived there with her child. Especially in the face of Riley’s inclusion of the identity of the residents for each of the other apartments and their present connection to the drug trade, the omission of McColley’s existence is all the more glaring. As drafted by Riley, with no mention of McColley, the warrant application makes it appear to the issuing magistrate that Stink was the only individual with custody and control of 396 First Street. If the residents of 396 First Street were properly identified, a reasonable issuing judge would have questioned the assertion that Stink had “custody and control” over the apartment.

Not only did Riley omit McColley’s very existence, but he covered up other areas where evidence lacked. Pooler attacks Riley’s double-standard on submitting supporting facts in his warrant applications.

While the police may not have been required to corroborate the CI’s assertions, once they undertook this surveillance and observed no such criminal activity, this lack of corroboration should have been included in the warrant application. The materiality of this information is underscored by the common sense observation that if the surveillance had yielded evidence of criminality, that information certainly would have been included in the warrant application and deemed to have been damning. The mere fact that the outcome of the surveillance was not the one the police would have preferred does not render the information immaterial.

These omissions are what cost Riley his immunity in the first place. The lower court determined these factual omissions raised sufficient Fourth Amendment questions that the county and its employee could not be granted immunity, which the defendants sought through a motion for summary judgement. This was denied and the immunity yanked, prompting the appeal to 2nd Circuit Court. This appeal has now been denied. Despite Pooler’s enumeration of Riley’s wrongdoing, the appeal is mainly denied on technical grounds (i.e., lack of jurisdiction).

The case is now being sent back to the lower court for a jury trial. McColley still has a chance to hold the county and Riley accountable for violating her Fourth Amendment rights.

And what did Riley’s task force secure with its illicitly-obtained no-knock warrant?

The search of McColley’s home did not uncover any money, weapons, drugs, drug related paraphernalia, or any evidence of criminality of any kind. The ERT took only a National Grid electric and gas bill and a registration bill for Hudson Valley Community College as fruits of the search.

Three bills from an residence noted on the warrant application as a “stash house” and all based on the claims of a known criminal who would tell the police anything to stay out of jail and a cop who simply left out any info that would have made a no-knock warrant harder to obtain. CI’s suddenly don’t look all that “informative” when you depict them like any cop or DA would if they were on the stand rather than running “controlled buys” for their handlers. And the cop himself isn’t looking any more trustworthy than his sources.

Filed Under: immunity, michael riley, no knock warrant, police, rights