There was evidence that Sandra Day O’Connor was against this finding but the case was reargued after Alito’s confirmation and the decision reached by a 5-4 vote. I agree with Breyer’s dissenting opinion that, if evidence of an illegal search is still admissible, the knock-and-announce rule becomes entirely moot: “…[T]he court destroys the strongest legal incentive to comply with the Constitution’s knock-and-announce requirement. And the court does so without significant support in precedent.”

It also seems, as critics propose, that this is a serious and wrong-headed overall challenge to the protections of the Fourth Amendment, that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence. In this case, the argument goes, it is unfair to exclude the evidence obtained without knock-and-announce because the evidence would still have been found if the police had waited a few moments longer; and also that the right being protected was a trivial one when weighed against the adverse consequences of the exclusion of incriminating evidence. This ignores the fact that rule of law is not based on how well the end justifies the means in any given instance, but on the overriding importance of a consistent principled stance that transcends the individual case at hand.

How does it feel to have a Court where Anthony Kennedy is the new swing vote between, on one side, Roberts-Alito-Scalia-Thomas and, on the other, Ginsburg-Souter-Breyer-Stevens?