Recent Supreme Court ruling further erodes privacy rights

It has not been a banner year for the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Chiselers on all government fronts continue to chip away at its protections guaranteeing Americans freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.
In Congress, renewal of the Patriot Act in March permitted hundreds of thousands of Americans to continue to be subject to secret searches authorized by the government.
In the White House, the president has brazenly claimed authority to conduct electronic surveillance against citizens without a warrant of any kind.
In the law enforcement community, an Associated Press investigation has found that federal and local police across the country have been gathering Americans' phone records from private data brokers without subpoenas or warrants.
And just last week, in the U.S. Supreme Court, a longstanding legal principle inexorably tied to the Fourth Amendment was ripped asunder. The high court, in a 5-4 decision, struck down the knock-and-announce rule, which required evidence obtained by police who did not knock or announce their presence to be excluded from use at a trial.
Premise of knock-and-announce
The misguided ruling marks a rejection of a bedrock safeguard in the criminal justice system established in the 1960s by the high court under then Chief Justice Earl Warren. That court adopted the approach that violations by law enforcement officials of certain procedural requirements, such as knock-and-announce, would necessitate the exclusion of evidence from use at a trial.
As David Moran, a law professor at Wayne State University Law School who argued the case at the Supreme Court put it, "It seems to rethink the entire exclusionary rule, which is the only thing that has caused the police for the past 50 years to generally comply with the Fourth Amendment."
A large minority on the court agreed. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a dissent that he could find no legal precedent supporting elimination of the no-knock ruling in any of the Fourth Amendment privacy cases decided since 1914.
"It represents a significant departure from the court's precedents," Justice Breyer wrote. "And it weakens, perhaps destroys, much of the practical value of the Constitution's knock-and-announce protection."
About the case
The case before the court, Hudson v. Michigan, stemmed from an August 1998 search by seven Detroit police officers of the home of Booker Hudson. The police obtained a warrant to search for weapons and drugs at Hudson's home. One of the officers turned the doorknob and entered the home through the unlocked front door. They did not knock, nor did they wait to see if anyone would answer the door in response to a shout, according to briefs filed in the case.
Police found crack cocaine in plastic bags and a loaded revolver, and Hudson was convicted and sentenced to 18 months probation. He appealed on the grounds that the evidence should have been suppressed because police violated the knock-and-announce rule.
Even though the Michigan court and the high court acknowledged that by ignoring the knock-and-announce rule, the officers did violate Hudson's Fourth Amendment rights, Hudson's appeal was rejected. That rejection flies in the face of a unanimous Supreme Court decision in 1995 that the rule is not just a useful custom, but, in most instances, a constitutional obligation.
By banishing the exclusionary rule, the justices have made it easier for police to give short shrift to the privacy rights that the Fourth Amendment guarantees. Coupled with the recent dilution of search-and-seizure protections in other branches of government, it appears as if there's no end in sight to the siege against the Fourth Amendment.
That should trouble all Americans who refuse to sacrifice any of their 217-year-old constitutional protections.