Judge Napolitano explains why the decision to allow police officers to break into homes on suspicion of illegal activity is wrong and that citizens should fight back against this unconstitutional SCOTUS decision.
Writing on behalf of the Supreme Court’s dominant Authoritarian Right faction, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the fault resided entirely with defendant Hollis King, who supposedly could have refused to respond to the police (presumably by remaining perfectly silent), or could have come to the door and demanded that the police return with a warrant. “Occupants who choose not to stand on their constitutional rights but instead elect to attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame,” sniffed Alito.
“How `secure’ do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?” replied Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “The court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in drug cases. In lieu of presenting their evidence to a neutral magistrate, police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, nevermind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant.”
For several years, Punitive Populists have insisted that the Regime should be permitted to torture people identified as “terrorists,” since such people aren’t entitled to the protection of legal guarantees such as those found in the Eighth Amendment and the Geneva Conventions. After all, we already know that they’re terrorists, and so they shouldn’t be permitted to withhold evidence. After all, the Constitution “isn’t a suicide pact.” Obviously, the same reasoning (once again, assuming that this is the appropriate word) applies to the Fourth Amendment’s purported guarantees against warrantless searches.
There is a sense, I suppose, in which the Constitution is a suicide pact: It has been used to seduce people into thinking that parchment can serve as an effective impediment to power.-Farewell, Fourth Amendment
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