Interesting post by Nathan Newman at TPM Cafe on what happens when the Supreme Court’s new no-knock doctrine meets the Castle doctrine. It’s short, so here it is in its entirety:
Two conservative legal doctrines are on a collision course. Today, the rightwing majority upheld the right of the police to enter homes without warning.
But recently, states like Florida have been passing NRA-backed “Castle Doctrine” bills that give homeowners the right to assume an unknown intruder is there to do bodily harm and can therefore be shot without any obligation by the homeowner to establish that the intruder is actually a danger.
Now, the text of such Castle Doctrine laws don’t actually protect you if you shoot a police officer, but if the police don’t identify themselves when they enter a home, it’ll create a pretty bad legal tangle for juries when defendants can claim they thought the officer was an unknown intruder against whom they had the right to shoot on sight.
Cops are generally pretty pragmatic about avoiding getting shot, which is why they usually knock and announce, even if they don’t give the people in the building a chance to think about what’s happening. Hell, they even have a cop knock. Cops are usually in favor of gun control, regardless of how conservative they are on other issues.
So, expect to see one of these doctrines giving way. My guess is that cops in Castle Doctrine states will be knocking even as they work on getting those laws repealed.