Court: No right to resist illegal cop entry into home.
INDIANAPOLIS | Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.
In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry… [more]
TAL Commentary:
There’s something special about the state. It’s kind of like a king, an emperor, or even a petty god. Pretty much anything you can imagine being a crime, the state has the privilege to do it with impunity. Consider:
- Sexual assault. The state can grope your privates before you get on a plane. If anyone else did this it would be an outrage, but when the TSA does it, it’s for your own good.
- Slavery. The state can force you to work for several months every year for its own benefit, and takes whatever you earn during that time. If you refuse to turn over the product of your own labor, men with guns will assault you and take you to prison. In short, you’re working for them, like it or not. It’s slavery. If anyone else tried to steal your money you could defend yourself, but not against the state.
- Forcible entry. Now, under this ruling, you can’t defend yourself against unlawful entry. If anyone else broke into your house unlawfully you could defend yourself, but not against the state.
If you can’t resist an unlawful entry, what’s the point of even calling it unlawful? What difference does it make to the police? To say an entry is unlawful is to say there is no right to enter, but this ruling says he does have the right to enter — even unlawfully, which is to make the unlawfulness meaningless.
The court says you can’t resist unlawful entry but “don’t worry, you have other remedies.” I guess you can sue the cop or whatever if it turns out he didn’t have the right to enter, but this a meaningless remedy. The very point of saying it’s unlawful is to give you the right to resist. It’s like saying you have no right to resist a rape — just shut up and take it; you can sue him later. If it turns out the rapist had no right to rape, we’ll give you money and make it all better.
It’s completely absurd, but this is the kind of jurisprudence you have to expect from the state. It is, after all, a judicial monopolist, and a monopolist always minimizes quality and maximizes cost. This case proves the point; we have very low quality jurisprudence at tremendous cost.
For the three judges in the majority to think the post-unlawful-entry remedies are adequate, they’d have to be ignorant of what everyone else has known since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215; that unlawful entry is very much like rape. Once the state violates your home, the damage is done.
For Liberty