Indiana Court says police can enter homes without warrant?

[nsaspook]

Your whole post is an appeal to patriotism as a response to a single line of mine and you accuse me of making unworthy responses? That is a joke.

I am American by the way and, while neither a lawyer nor student of law, I have done a fair share of reading on the subject.

The courts do not just determine "punishment", they determine whether an action was indeed unlawful first and then determine punishment. In fact our court system quite frequently deems acts that were believed unlawful by some citizen or officer to have actually been lawful. Citizens and officers may not decide what is lawful, they may act reasonably and within their capacity to make determinations of what may be unlawful.

When you can discuss these issues with clarity rather than throwing about patriotic rhetoric I'd be glad to have a real discussion.

I will just add that citizens in the jury can decide guilt or innocent beyond the law. (jury nullification) So the determination of lawful actions is in the hands of the citizens in a jury trial to the point to totally ignoring current law. Officers of the court are sworn to uphold the law but you as a decider are not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

http://fija.org/

 

[Acetone]

@Ape:

Neither officers nor citizens determine what is and is not lawful. They may make a reasonable assessment of whether something is unlawful and act in a reasonable manner in response. If a person is on your property you may stop them and question them and request that they leave if they fail to show reasonable cause for them to be on your property. If they have been given reasonable opportunity to leave and have failed to do so then they may be considered trespassers at which point you may call the police or perhaps, depending on the jurisdiction, you may have the right to attempt to forcibly remove them.

Isn't this ruling in direct conflict with what you just said? As I read it if a officer enters a home and the occupants say 'you may not enter' NO resistance is allowed simply because they are police.

To give the police special rights which limits the peoples ability to actively resist against them when they are engaging in illegal activities is ridiculous.

 

[ThomasT]

IMO, the trial judge should just have read the jury instruction tendered by the defendant in the original case, and left it up to the jury to decide whether the police entry was lawful or unlawful.

It just occurred to me that this isn't what juries of peers are entrusted to do. They, traditionally, render decisions only wrt matters of fact, via the assumption that public officials would be less likely to act impartially.

So, was the trial judge correct in omitting the jury instruction tendered by the defendant in the original case? And, if so, was the ISC, in its affirmation of that decision, then correct in saying that what this means is that no person has the right to resist any entry, legal or illegal, to his private domicile by an agent of the government?

It does seem to me that the ISC decision gives powers to government agents that the 4th Amendment was intended to constrain.