United States V. Ankeny: Remedying the Fourth Amendment's Reasonable Manner Requirement

Abstract

At 5:30 a.m., just before dawn, forty-four police officers converged on Kelly David Ankeny’s two-story Portland residence to execute a warrant for his arrest. The officers in charge had spent weeks crafting a plan to arrest Ankeny, a convicted and wanted felon, for assaulting his estranged wife with a firearm. In a matter of seconds, heavily armed police broke down the building’s firstfloor doors, while others outside fired rubber bullets through the building’s second-floor windows, spewing glass into the house and leaving holes in the ceiling and furniture. The first officer who encountered Ankeny pointed a riflemounted flashlight in his eyes and ordered him to the ground, just as a second officer blindly tossed a “flash-bang” grenade into the room. The grenade exploded near Ankeny’s face, causing firstand second-degree burns. Meanwhile, police entering the second floor threw a flash-bang into an occupied bedroom, setting fire to a mattress and box spring that the police then threw out of a window. After securing the occupants, including a pregnant woman and one-year-old infant, one of the officers sent the following text message: “BIG TIME FUN!! LOTS OF BROKEN GLASS, BAD GUY JUMPED ON THE FLASHBANG, GOOD TIME HAD BY ALL.” In United States v. Ankeny, a divided Ninth Circuit panel declined to suppress the weapons that were discovered in Ankeny’s residence and used to charge him with, inter alia, being a felon in possession of firearms. Over Judge Reinhardt’s dissent, the majority held that suppression was an inappropriate remedy regardless of whether the search at issue was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Drawing on the Supreme Court’s recent knock-and-