The Glade 4.0

I should point out, that the incidence rate of things related to this law is likely to be so low as to be "statistically insignificant."

It's an interesting philosophical exercise to discuss it, but I have to imagine cases where it is successfully used are essentially nil.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I will say that my judgement is superior to yours. I am willing to debate my judgement with the legal system via their preferred method. As to whether or not I'm free to defend myself in my house, I'm always free to defend myself in my house. It's my house. If I am defending myself and shouldn't be, then that's another story.

I'm not attempting to argue it's the best option, but it needs to be an option.

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Warrants are issued upon probable cause, so it is entirely possible that you were not actually doing anything criminal, but probable cause could still be established. The warrant is completely relevant to the situation. A warrant means that the officers to whom it is issued have a duty to execute it - not a right, not a privilege, nor an option, but rather that they must do so and in a timely fashion. Your personal certainty that you have not done anything illegal isn't relevant, even if it is justified.



I'm saying that you should probably make some tactical assessment before you engage in a firefight. Obviously there will be limits on your ability to do so, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't. Exactly how much foreknowledge you have of the situation depends entirely on the situation. It might be considerable; it might be nonexistent.

What I'm getting at here is that regardless of the law and your rights, getting into a firefight with the police is not likely to be a good idea. This law creates the impression that the citizen actually has a reasonable chance of winning the aforementioned fight, which is not going to be the case very often, whether the citizen is in the right or not. It would be preferable for citizens to survive encounters where the police are in the wrong and pursue redress through the court, rather than to simply punish the officers after the citizen is already dead.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

And this is the biggest problem with it. Unsuccessfully employing it is likely to be worse for the citizen than the prospect of defending against a criminal charge for which they are innocent.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No disagreement here.



I disagree with that impression.



Sure. It's also preferable for there to be an incentive to not make unlawful entry. There now is.


I don't see the negatives here.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I think that's the problem. The law is not written with you or Shuyung in mind; it's written with society in general in mind. The law has to be viewed in light of how it can be taken by that relatively large portion of the populace that are unable or unwilling to rationally understand the law and the reality of the situation, nor make a sound judgement about it.

Unrealistic tactical fantasizing is not an uncommon vice.



There already is one - the loss of employment, possibilities of criminal and civil proceedings, being publicly embarassed by the press.

The problem of those entries that shouldn't be done in the first place is best addressed by not permitting no-knock warrants. As for those entries that are made with total disregard for the law, officers that do that sort of thing are not likely to be deterred by homeowners defending themselves. They'll just come up with new ways to cover things up.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Except that all three of those are rare, with the last one being the only one that I wouldn't classify as "extremely" rare.



What about wrong-door raids?

Personally, I think that, beyond no-knock (which we appear to be on the same page on) using SWAT for arrest warrants non-violent offenders, as well as for search warrants on non-violent offenders, should be outlawed and that specific forms of redress for homes entered unlawfully should be laid out. Including, but not limited to revocation of criminal prosecution immunity for the officers (and leaders) conducting and authorizing the raids.

That's a pipe dream, but probably more effective than a law like this.

That said, I see nothing wrong with this law, it has effectively simply codified the right to shoot at armed home invaders, even if they have badges on.

Edit: While codifying that right, it says nothing about whether doing so is "good," "effective," or "smart."

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

There's the problem. I'm not opposed to the law on its face, but the proverbial devil is in the details. Generally speaking I'm not a big fan of advocating shooting at cops (who are usually better trained and armed) on iffy circumstances. Then again, it could be a good in cases like the so called "Third Amendment violation" in the other thread. Either way, It's Indiana's sovereign right to weigh those issues against the laws merits, and we'll have to see how the case law grows out of it and if applications to be police officers in the state are adversely affected.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

A government that does not fear reprisal of its citizens is a government that will abuse its citizens. Not can, not might. Will. Will abuse its citizens. Every time, in every country, through every era of history.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

What about them? If the police are simply at the wrong house, a need to knock adds one more chance for them to realize the mistake before they bust in. If they still don't realize it and do bust in, how does the citizen benefit from getting into a firefight with them? Now he's traded the likelyhood of being handcuffed for a far greater likelihood of being shot to death. I don't see how being allowed to defend himself gains him anything other than the chance for even greater



Police do not have immunity from prosecution for conducting raids. Qualified immunity only affects good faith actions taken in areas where the law is not already clearly established, and the laws regarding warrants are pretty well established. Police have a duty to execute warrants, but if the warrant is wrong and they know it is wrong, they have a duty not to execute it and to have the mistake fixed. If they don't know it is wrong, there arises the question of whether the same officers actually conducting the entry are the ones responsible for the error. It doesn't make a lot of sense to do anything to the ones conducting the entry if they were assured by their superiors that the warrant was correct.



Then I really don't see why you think this law is a good idea. I don't see that it actually addresses a problem at all. It makes citizens feel like they can defend themselves by avoiding prosecution, but in the event something happens, there's a very high likelyhood it won't matter to the now-deceased citizen.



I don't see much point in a "right" whose primary effect is to get the citizen killed exercising it. Self-defense against criminals is one thing; criminals are not able to bring the type of resources to bear that the police can.

I predict that among those will be people shooting because they have the law as they think it should be confused with the law that is.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Which this law has absolutely nothing to do with.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

DE:

I establish those things as rare because most wrong door raids don't lead to reprimand, much less charges.

We're on the same page on no-knock, so it's not worth discussing.

And finally, it doesn't matter if exercising a right gets you killed. It's your right to choose.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

How do you know? Wrong-door raids are rare to begin with, so where do you get this from, or do you just imagine that it must be like that?



This is a right established by law, and the discussion is whether the legislature should establish that right in the first place. The fact that it serves no purpose except to get the citizen killed indicates that the legislature should not establish it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I get it from the all the stats I've ever seen, which I'm choosing to not bother sourcing. And personally, I wouldn't call wrong door raids "rare" at all, except perhaps on a relative scale.



No rights are established by law, only protected by law. They've merely codified the rights of the homeowner, here.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Except this one, where the Supreme Court of Indiana ruled homeowners have no right to self-defense during illegal entries. So this law does in practice create a right that didn't exist.

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In that case, I'll just choose to disregard your assessment.



The idea that rights exist independent of law is entirely a conceit of the writers of founding documents. It sounds great on paper, but it doesn't make any sense. If rights are not codified, how does anyone know they have them? Because a certain philosophy says so?

In any case, that's the sort of abstract debate that takes over altogether too many threads. Functionally, there is no difference between rights being protected and rights being established. The UN can make all the silly "Declarations of Human Rights" it wants; whether North Korean people have those rights and the state is not protecting them, or whether they don't have them because NK didn't make laws establishing them is irrelevant. Either way, the rights are not available to them.

Claiming that rights are only "protected" by law is just a way of begging the question. Any law that gets passed protecting any arbitrary right could be justified that way. Some people would claim a universal right to free health care and use that argument to claim a national health system is merely "protecting" it. The fact that other philosophies would claim that right can't exist for whatever reason is irrelevant; we do not have a system under which certain political ideologies are acceptable and others are not.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There are two huge problems with these kinds of laws:

1. The homeowner has absolutely no way of discerning the difference between a lawful and unlawful police raid. How do you know the cops have the warrant for the wrong house? You don't. Even if you somehow knew you hadn't committed any crimes (pretty much impossible due to how many laws we have and how all-encompassing they are) the police could still have probable cause for any number of reasons. All laws like this do is randomly get criminals, who were going to shoot at the police anyways, off after the fact.

2. In many cases the police officers risking their lives executing the warrant also will have no way of knowing the warrant is unlawful. If the copy of the warrant they get has the wrong address printed on it, how are they supposed to know? Furthermore, if the homeowner shoots at them and they kill him, now they're guilty of murder despite the fact that they did everything right.

This is equally a problem with or without this law. It won't get criminals off, however. If the criminal is likely to shoot at the police anyway, he's likely to get killed. While criminals might try to assert that the raid was illegal just because they wish it was, this usually doesn't work out too well for them. Criminals tend to get their ideas of the law from "street" or "jailhouse lawyers" who are less than expert.



In this case, it's the person obtaining the warrant and issuing the order to execute it that's at fault, not the team actually going in.

There is an actual value to this law, and that is that criminals impersonating the police are less likely to be able to do so.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It makes much sense because it places equality of opportunity and mutual respect for differences at the center of political philosophy.

Saying it doesn't make sense is like saying nothing anyone has or will use to make a moral judgement makes any sense.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

The point is that before the law, a criminal who shoots at the cops is always guilty, provided he survives, even if there's a mistake with the warrant. After the law, if there happens to be a mistake, the criminal gets off.

I'm a little unclear on how you think this scenario could actually come about. Are the police at the house of the person specified on the warrant, or the wrong house in the situation you imagine?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Let's say the police are at the wrong house. A law-abiding homeowner can't shoot at them, before or after the law. Before the law it's explicitly illegal, afterwards he still can't because he has no way to know that the raid is illegal. However, if the homeowner is a criminal and shoots at the police, he gets off regardless of the fact that he also had no way of knowing the illegality of the raid and would have shot at them regardless.

Yes, I realize it's pretty unlikely that the cops raid the wrong house and the people in the wrong house are also criminals, but since it doesn't really provide any benefit at all to law-abiding individuals the whole thing is just a useless net negative.

This "can" and "can't" distinction you're making, it is nonsense.

If your home is invaded, and you shoot the invader(s), and those invaders were police, and they were acting unlawfully, there is no legal penalty accruing to you.
If your home is invaded, and you shoot the invader(s), and those invaders were police, and they were acting lawfully, there is no material increase to the crap you're in.
Either way, there's nothing stopping you, other than your natural inclination to either shoot or not shoot an invader.

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You forgot "If Your home is invaded, and you shoot the invader(s), and those invaders were not police, there is no legal penalty accruing to you."

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Technically, it's true that a homeowner could not know for sure if the police have a warrant or not, but as a practical matter it's very very VERY unlikely that someone would have absolutely no idea that they were doing something illegal enough to warrant a no-knock or raid-type warrant service, and yet have a completely legitimate warrant out for them.

As for a criminal getting away because the police raided the wrong house but it just so happened that the people raided were criminals... that's really not a problem. If you raided the wrong house, you discovered that criminal evidence illegally and it wouldn't be admissible.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."