TalkLeft
Atlanta
police kill 92 year old woman in drug raid; flawed SCOTUS
policy?
By
Last
Night in Little Rock, Section Crime
Policy
Posted on Wed Nov 22, 2006 at 02:30:17 PM EST
In
Northeast Atlanta
, near Georgia Tech, police made a drug buy from a house and
came back with a search warrant, raiding the house. They shot
dead a 92 year old woman who had a gun defending her house.
The
Atlanta
police involved seemed, to me, particularly cavalier about the
entire matter. "'This seems like another tragedy
involving drugs,' [
ADA
] Howard said."
How
much of this is attributable to flawed Supreme Court policy
statements?
The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution has this story today: Questions
surround fatal shooting of woman, 92:
As
a northwest
Atlanta
neighborhood roiled over news that police had stormed a house
and shot a 92-year-old woman,
Atlanta
police officials said Wednesday that cops had made a drug buy
at the home and were returning to search the residence.
Three
narcotics investigators were wounded in the Tuesday night
shooting when the home's occupant emptied a six-shot revolver
at them. Police identified the dead woman as Kathryn Johnston.
The investigators were released from the hospital Wednesday
morning.
Assistant
Police Chief Alan Dreher said a suspect was not arrested after
the buy. He said the suspect's identity is not known, nor is
it known what relationship, if any, the suspect had to the
dead woman.
Dreher,
in a news conference on Wednesday, said the officers broke
through a burglar bar entry door and then a wooden door. The
police, whom Dreher called "experienced officers,"
were not wearing uniforms but had on vests with
"police" on the front. He said they were inside the
house when they were shot.
Investigator
Gregg Junnier, 40, was shot three times, police said, in the
side of the face, in the leg and in the center of his
protective vest. Investigator Gary Smith, 38, was shot in the
left leg, and Investigator Cary Bond, 38, was shot in the left
arm.
"There
is going to be a complete investigation," Dreher said.
"There have been no predeterminations made in this
case."
He
said that "suspected narcotics" were found at the
home at
933 Neal Street
, an area west and north of the Georgia Dome known for drug
activity.
Dreher
handled details of the incident because Chief Richard J.
Pennington was out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Fulton
County District Attorney Paul Howard said the officers in such
situations "use what they believe is their best
intelligence" when entering a home to make an arrest.
"They thought they could enter the home safely."
"This
seems like another tragedy involving drugs," Howard said.
It
was not immediately clear how long
Johnston
had lived at the
Neal Street
home. Neighbors said she lived alone. On Wednesday morning,
they described her as a "good neighbor" and said she
was "law abiding."
State
Rep. "Able" Mable Thomas (D-Atlanta) called
Johnston's death "unfortunate" and said a number of
upset neighbors and other residents called to say neither
Johnston nor her Neal Street home were in any way connected to
illegal drug activity, as police suggested.
"The
community does not want to digest that there was a 92-year-old
woman in that house and all of a sudden there's a
confrontation with police and now she's dead," said
Thomas, whose district includes the neighborhood where the
shooting occurred. "A confrontation with police and a
92-year-old woman don't go together."
Police
say they followed proper procedures. Thomas hopes they did,
but added: "When you see a 92-year-old being the victim
of circumstances like this, we know something is going
wrong."
Atlanta
is CNN's hometown, but their story
is much shorter, but includes a video of a relative of the
deceased.
Since
Justice Scalia and his cohorts on the U.S.
Supreme Court decided last Term in Hudson
v. Michigan that the exclusionary
rule no longer applies to knock-and-announce, the police no
longer have any incentive to comply with the law, although the
Court said that there were other purported protections of
citizens besides the exclusionary rule. (Mrs. Johnston and her
family would certainly differ.) And, if the police no
longer have an incentive to comply with the law, it is only
natural that innocent deaths will happen, both of officers and
civilians. I wrote the brief in the knock-and-announce case of
Wilson
v. Arkansas and I wrote most of the
brief in Richards
v. Wisconsin. The government always
talks about the need to not announce to protect officers from
injury or death at the hands of criminals, but they never
wrote in any brief that they were the slightest bit concerned
with potential deaths of civilians or of police at the hands
of innocent civilians.
Mr.
Justice Scalia and those who voted with you, this death was
encouraged by your holding. I'm not going to the extreme
of saying that this poor woman's death is "on your
hands," but her death certainly points out that you did
not know what you were talking about when you wrote
Hudson
and uncritically took all the "empirical evidence"
and government arguments at face value, ignoring reality and
common sense. In my fourteen years of intimate experience with
the knock-and-announce rule since the suppression hearing in Wilson,
I have seen the callousness of police and courts to the
"right of the people to be secure" "from
unreasonable searches and seizures."
Please,
just admit that you were wrong in uncritically accepting
police arguments about their needs and ignoring citizen
protections, and overrule
Hudson
so Mrs. Johnston will not have died in vain.
Link:
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/11/22/153017/60
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