NJ: <6 second delay between 5 am announcement and entry violated state constitution

Less than six seconds between announcement and entry at 5 am violated the state constitutional guarantee for announcement before entry. Defendant was not known to ever be violent. State v. Nieves, 2023 N.J. Super. LEXIS 84 (Aug. 9, 2023):

In sum, we are convinced any reasoned analysis of the pertinent factors requires a finding the officers did not wait a reasonable amount of time — less than five seconds — before forcibly entering the premises. To the extent the reasonableness of the wait time is measured against whether the occupants of the residence had time to get to the door or to destroy evidence, Robinson, 200 N.J. at 13-14, the recording provides vivid and compelling evidence none of the occupants had the opportunity to do either during the less-than-five seconds the officers waited before knocking in the front door at 5:00 a.m. The knock-and-announce and forcible breach of the door shown in the recording occurred so quickly and with such fluidity that the occupants of the house were effectively denied the requisite pause and reasonable wait period to which they are constitutionally entitled prior to the officers’ forcible entry.

We do not find there could never be circumstances under which a waiting time of five seconds or less may be reasonable. We determine only that because the pertinent factors weigh strongly against the abbreviated wait-time here, and the State offers no objective facts known to the officers demonstrating any urgency presented by the execution of the warrant, the less-than-five-second period the officers waited here constitutes an unreasonable, and unconstitutional, execution of a knock-and-announce warrant. See, e.g., Granville, 222 F.3d at 1218 (finding early morning forced entry unreasonable because occupants were likely still asleep and five seconds was insufficient time to infer denial of admittance).

To hold otherwise under the circumstances presented — where the purported pause following the officers’ first knock-and-announce is tantamount to no pause at all — would impermissibly render the constitutional requirement that officers wait a reasonable time prior to making a forcible entry during the execution of a knock-and-announce search warrant a meaningless nullity. We therefore conclude the amount of time the officers waited after knocking and announcing before breaching the front door was unreasonable and violated defendant’s constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Robinson, 200 N.J. at 16-17.