COPS BOTCHED THE KNOCK: FLORIDA SUPREME COURT REWRITES RULES ON SEARCH WARRANTS

The Florida Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that evidence uncovered during a police search cannot be thrown out of court simply because officers failed to follow the state’s “knock-and-announce” rules before breaking down a door.

The 6-1 decision directly overturns a 16-year-old state legal precedent. It marks a major shift in how Florida courts handle cases where law enforcement officers rush into a home without giving occupants proper time to answer.

The case began during a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation into a suspected drug trafficking organization in Leon County. Police obtained a valid search warrant for a home where they believed drugs and cash were being stored. When executing the warrant, officers knocked multiple times and announced their presence twice. However, they only stated they possessed a search warrant a few seconds before using a battering ram to smash through the door.

Inside the home, officers found Keith Alexander Times, along with three other individuals. A search of the residence yielded cocaine, the drug “Molly,” two firearms, and more than $23,000 in cash. Times was subsequently charged with trafficking in amphetamines, possession of cocaine, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

Times successfully moved to suppress the evidence at the trial court level, arguing that officers violated Florida Statute section 933.09. That law requires police to give occupants a fair chance to open the door after announcing their authority and purpose. Because the occupants were not given sufficient time, the trial court threw out the evidence, a decision later affirmed by the First District Court of Appeal based on the Florida Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in State v. Cable.

However, the Supreme Court has now reversed that position. Writing for the majority, Justice Meredith Sasso explained that the text of the statute itself does not explicitly mandate that evidence must be excluded if the rule is broken.

“The plain text of section 933.09 does not authorize, let alone require, the suppression of evidence,” Sasso wrote.

The majority opinion clarified that the state legislature did not insert an exclusionary rule into the law. Instead, the legislature provided a different penalty: a century-old statute that makes it a second-degree misdemeanor for an officer to willfully exceed their authority or use unnecessary severity. The court ruled that judges do not have the power to invent judicial remedies that lawmakers chose to leave out of the statute.

Justice Jorge Labarga was the lone dissenter, strongly criticizing the majority for stripping away long-held privacy and safety protections. Labarga argued that the misdemeanor penalty for officers is completely ineffective, noting that the state could not provide a single example of an officer ever being prosecuted under it in its 100-year history.

“The absolute absence of criminal prosecutions against law enforcement officers for violating the knock-and-announce statute… serves as a significant indicator of the provision’s functional nullity,” Labarga wrote in his dissent.

Labarga maintained that throwing out illegally obtained evidence is the only functional way to protect citizens and deter police misconduct, stating the move “undermines the significant public interests which Florida’s statutory knock-and-announce provisions are meant to protect.”

With the Supreme Court answering the legal question in favor of the state, the decision by the First District Court of Appeal has been quashed. The case will now head back to the lower courts, allowing the prosecution to use the seized drugs and weapons as evidence against Times.

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