And by people who will willfully play an Orwellian two step.
Instead, the majority ruled that Cornish is responsible for his own death, because according to police, he should have known that they were the police when he attacked them with a sheathed knife, and his act of knowingly attacking the police after they had entered his home supersedes their failure to knock and announce. It is an utterly absurd ruling. Police don’t raid homes at 4:30 a.m, with battering rams in order to let suspects know that they’re the police. They raid homes at 4:30 a.m. with battering rams for the very purpose of disorienting and confusing suspects so that they can take them by surprise. You can’t simultaneously argue that confusing and disorienting a suspect is necessary to protect the safety of police officers, and that the same suspect you’re trying to confuse and disorient should be able to wake from a sleep, process what’s going on around him, immediately discern that the armed men who have just broken into his home are police serving a warrant and not criminals there to do him harm, and that should he make an error in judgment, he alone is responsible for the consequences — whether it’s the end of his own life, or his killing, or the injuring of one of the police officers.
Actually, it may not be logically consistent, but you can make both arguments. The police do it all the time. And the courts back them up.
But it’s even worse than all of that. It’s one thing to say a career criminal or major drug distributor should be aware of the possibility that he might be raided by the police. But if you’re a low-level offender — or an innocent person raided by mistake — there’s even less reason to immediately assume that the armed intruders in your home are cops.
Read the rest of the link for an interesting discussion on the history of warrant service and castle doctrine. And of course on the Drug War and "Looking tough on crime".
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