As a northwest Atlanta neighborhood roiled over news that police had stormed a house and shot a 92-year-old woman, Atlanta police officials said Wednesday that cops had made a drug buy at the home and were returning to search the residence.
Three narcotics investigators were wounded in the Tuesday night shooting when the home's occupant emptied a six-shot revolver at them. Police identified the dead woman as Kathryn Johnston. The investigators were released from the hospital Wednesday morning.
Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher said a suspect was not arrested after the buy. He said the suspect's identity is not known, nor is it known what relationship, if any, the suspect had to the dead woman.
Dreher, in a news conference on Wednesday, said the officers broke through a burglar bar entry door and then a wooden door. The police, whom Dreher called "experienced officers," were not wearing uniforms but had on vests with "police" on the front. He said they were inside the house when they were shot.
Investigator Gregg Junnier, 40, was shot three times, police said, in the side of the face, in the leg and in the center of his protective vest. Investigator Gary Smith, 38, was shot in the left leg, and Investigator Cary Bond, 38, was shot in the left arm.
"There is going to be a complete investigation," Dreher said. "There have been no predeterminations made in this case."
He said that "suspected narcotics" were found at the home at 933 Neal Street, an area west and north of the Georgia Dome known for drug activity.
Dreher handled details of the incident because Chief Richard J. Pennington was out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said the officers in such situations "use what they believe is their best intelligence" when entering a home to make an arrest. "They thought they could enter the home safely."
"This seems like another tragedy involving drugs," Howard said.
It was not immediately clear how long Johnston had lived at the Neal Street home. Neighbors said she lived alone. On Wednesday morning, they described her as a "good neighbor" and said she was "law abiding."
State Rep. "Able" Mable Thomas (D-Atlanta) called Johnston's death "unfortunate" and said a number of upset neighbors and other residents called to say neither Johnston nor her Neal Street home were in any way connected to illegal drug activity, as police suggested.
"The community does not want to digest that there was a 92-year-old woman in that house and all of a sudden there's a confrontation with police and now she's dead," said Thomas, whose district includes the neighborhood where the shooting occurred. "A confrontation with police and a 92-year-old woman don't go together."
Police say they followed proper procedures. Thomas hopes they did, but added: "When you see a 92-year-old being the victim of circumstances like this, we know something is going wrong."
Atlanta is CNN's hometown, but their story is much shorter, but includes a video of a relative of the deceased.
Since Justice Scalia and his cohorts on the U.S. Supreme Court decided last Term in Hudson v. Michigan that the exclusionary rule no longer applies to knock-and-announce, the police no longer have any incentive to comply with the law, although the Court said that there were other purported protections of citizens besides the exclusionary rule. (Mrs. Johnston and her family would certainly differ.) And, if the police no longer have an incentive to comply with the law, it is only natural that innocent deaths will happen, both of officers and civilians. I wrote the brief in the knock-and-announce case of Wilson v. Arkansas and I wrote most of the brief in Richards v. Wisconsin. The government always talks about the need to not announce to protect officers from injury or death at the hands of criminals, but they never wrote in any brief that they were the slightest bit concerned with potential deaths of civilians or of police at the hands of innocent civilians.
Mr. Justice Scalia and those who voted with you, this death was encouraged by your holding. I'm not going to the extreme of saying that this poor woman's death is "on your hands," but her death certainly points out that you did not know what you were talking about when you wrote Hudson and uncritically took all the "empirical evidence" and government arguments at face value, ignoring reality and common sense. In my fourteen years of intimate experience with the knock-and-announce rule since the suppression hearing in Wilson, I have seen the callousness of police and courts to the "right of the people to be secure" "from unreasonable searches and seizures."
Please, just admit that you were wrong in uncritically accepting police arguments about their needs and ignoring citizen protections, and overrule Hudson so Mrs. Johnston will not have died in vain.
[also posted on www.FourthAmendment.com]
