squashed:

I really don’t think your as unhappy with the actual holding in this case as you think you are. The upshot of the holding is that if the police illegally enter your property, you can’t assault them. You can still take other action. You can file a complaint. You can sue them. You can have any evidence seized in an illegal search excluded at trial. You just can’t beat them up. This keeps the police marginally safer at the cost of removing the kind of self-help protection that’s probably a bad idea in the first place.

‘Assault’, in the legal sense, and ‘beating someone up’ are pretty different things. Equating them seems like a bit of a straw man argument. Someone was assaulted here, but it doesn’t look like anyone was beaten up. It seems like there’s room for the position that it’s okay to shove an unlawful intruder out the door (assaulting them), but not okay to beat them bloody.

Which is not to say that I take that position, or disagree with Squashed’s conclusion. Or think that the police necessarily did anything wrong in this case, or that I know the first thing about American law. Still.

(Source: greaterthanlapsed)