{"id":51036,"date":"2022-01-06T11:50:39","date_gmt":"2022-01-06T16:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=51036"},"modified":"2022-01-06T11:50:39","modified_gmt":"2022-01-06T16:50:39","slug":"the-crime-report-search-warrants-rot-law-enforcement-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=51036","title":{"rendered":"The Crime Report: \u2018Search Warrants Rot Law Enforcement\u2019: Paper"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Crime Report: \u2018Search Warrants Rot Law Enforcement\u2019: Paper<\/a> by Andrea Cipriano:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

When 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker, was shot and killed by Louisville police officers in March 2020 during a botched raid on her apartment, the country was collectively \u201ctraumatized\u201d \u2014 particularly marginalized communities. While her death is an absolute tragedy, a law professor at the University of Kentucky writes that her death \u201ctranscends the narrative of bad-apple cops\u201d and highlights the broken system backing search warrants, according to a forthcoming Boston University Law Review paper.<\/p>

\u201cSomething rots in law enforcement,\u201d writes Blanche Cook, the paper\u2019s author. \u201cAnd it\u2019s the search warrant.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Something Rots in Law Enforcement and It\u2019s the Search Warrant: The Breonna Taylor Case<\/a>, 102 B.U.L.Rev. __ (2022 Forthcoming). Abstract:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When police rammed the door of Breonna Taylor\u2019s home and shot her six times in a hail of thirty-two bullets, they lacked legal justification for being there. The affidavit supporting the warrant was perjurious, stale, vague, and lacking in particularity. The killing of Breonna Taylor, however, is not just a story about the illegality of the warrant, it is also about the legality of the circumstances that facilitated her killing. Police officers lying to obtain warrants and magistrates rubber stamping facially defective warrants are the stories of individual failings. This article examines a weightier structural issue: how the Supreme Court fashioned legal doctrine that created the conditions that led to Breonna Taylor\u2019s death.<\/p>

This article transcends the narrative of bad-apple cops. It is the first to present a structural framework for analyzing how Court rulings about the acquisition and execution of search warrants inequitably distribute premature death in marginalized communities. When the Court refused to apply the exclusionary rule to evidence obtained in violation of the knock-and-announce requirement, it incentivized police to ignore the rule. The result has been callousness in the execution of warrants and carelessness in their acquisition. When the Court gave police immunity for violating the rule, it sealed Breonna Taylor\u2019s fate. Police refusal to knock and announce and to engage in a substantial waiting period before ramming the door is untenable in an age of increased Stand Your Ground Laws and unbridled gun ownership. The proper protocols for police home invasion demand SCOTUS review.<\/p>

The spectacle of Taylor\u2019s killing, along with so many others, inflicted a cultural trauma on the public, particularly marginalized communities. The illegal warrant that set Taylor\u2019s death in motion, therefore, demands a public vetting, preferably in an adversarial setting where one party does not monopolize both the facts and the narratives surrounding those facts. The repeated failure to hold police accountable for their killings will destroy the criminal justice system as we know it. The next Breonna Taylor is both foreseeable and preventable if that is what we elect to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Crime Report: \u2018Search Warrants Rot Law Enforcement\u2019: Paper by Andrea Cipriano:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-knock-and-announce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51037,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51036\/revisions\/51037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}