The point bluntly is what will happen when a policeman breaks down a door unannounced in Florida and gets shot to death.
The shooter invokes the NRA's self defense law.
Now what happens next? Does the shooter go free?
Not if the officer had a warrant...since the Florida law specifically applies to an
unlawful forced entry. A majority of states have such laws, including my state of North Carolina, as well as California. In Florida, if you shoot an officer executing a warrant in good faith (even if the warrant is not valid), you're going to face voluntary manslaughter at best, and the death penalty for murder of a police officer at worst.
Most states also make it a crime to resist an officer of the law who is performing his offical duties in good faith, even if he/she is acting on a search warrant that (unbeknownst to him/her) is invalid.
Now, if the officer does NOT have a warrant, and is knowingly acting outside the law, the the law would treat the officer as it would any other armed criminal, whether or not the state in question had a Castle Doctrine law. But I assume that isn't the situation you're describing.
The problem is, if you are NOT a criminal, NOT doing or selling drugs, etc., then the masked men kicking in your door are unlikely to be police officers at all. Police occasionally get the wrong house, but they are usually very careful not to raid the wrong place (big civil liability, if nothing else). In the past few years, the number of home invasions by criminals
posing as police have greatly outnumbered incidents of police raiding the wrong place, although thankfully both are quite rare. But if the police do raid the wrong house, and do so by kicking in the door like common criminals, then it's a lose-lose situation for everybody. That's was a major rationale why no-knock warrants
used to be restricted to special circumstances (known violent criminals, etc.) instead of having
de facto blanket approval, as I've mentioned previously:
http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/1997/may976.htmUNDERLYING RATIONALE FOR KNOCK AND ANNOUNCE
The Supreme Court has determined that "every householder, the good and the bad, the guilty and the innocent, is entitled to the protection designed to secure the common interest against unlawful invasion of the house."19 The knock and announce rule provides citizens with psychological security, knowing that one need not fear an unexpected intrusion. Privacy interests also are protected, avoiding unnecessary embarrassment, shock, or property damage resulting from an unannounced entry.
The rule serves to protect both the individual citizen and the police from the risk of harm and the potential for violence that may occur as a result of an unannounced entry.20 Announcement protects officers by ensuring that they are not "mistaken for prowlers and shot down by a fearful householder."21 Innocent citizens also are protected from law enforcement officers who mistakenly might shoot armed occupants who merely are trying to defend themselves from who they preceive to be armed intruders.
Now that the Supreme Court says a routine search warrant no longer has to give the homeowner the
opportunity to comply peacefully in order for evidence to be admissible in court, then I'm afraid some police departments might be tempted to take a more gung-ho approach to serving routine warrants, and that sets up a bad situation if they get the wrong house. Making paramilitary raids a potential first resort for serving routine search warrants is a step down a bad road indeed.
IMHO, the way out of this is to reserve no-knock warrants for known violent criminals, and return "knock and announce" warrants to the role they were intended.
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