934
Opinion of the Court
Rule of Announcement and Unlawful Entry, 112 U. Pa. L. Rev. 499, 504-508 (1964) (collecting cases).
Our own cases have acknowledged that the common-law principle of announcement is "embedded in Anglo-American law," Miller v. United States, 357 U. S. 301, 313 (1958), but we have never squarely held that this principle is an element of the reasonableness inquiry under the Fourth Amendment.3 We now so hold. Given the longstanding common-law endorsement of the practice of announcement, we have little doubt that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment thought that the method of an officer's entry into a dwelling was among the factors to be considered in assessing the reasonableness of a search or seizure. Contrary to the decision below, we hold that in some circumstances an officer's unannounced entry into a home might be unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
This is not to say, of course, that every entry must be preceded by an announcement. The Fourth Amendment's flexible requirement of reasonableness should not be read to mandate a rigid rule of announcement that ignores counter-vailing law enforcement interests. As even petitioner concedes, the common-law principle of announcement was never stated as an inflexible rule requiring announcement under all circumstances. See Ker v. California, 374 U. S. 23, 38 (1963) (plurality opinion) ("[I]t has been recognized from the early common law that . . . breaking is permissible in executing an arrest under certain circumstances"); see also, e. g.,
3 In Miller, our discussion focused on the statutory requirement of announcement found in 18 U. S. C. § 3109 (1958 ed.), not on the constitutional requirement of reasonableness. See 357 U. S., at 306, 308, 313. See also Sabbath v. United States, 391 U. S. 585, 591, n. 8 (1968) (suggesting that both the "common law" rule of announcement and entry and its "exceptions" were codified in § 3109); Ker v. California, 374 U. S. 23, 40-41 (1963) (plurality opinion) (reasoning that an unannounced entry was reasonable under the "exigent circumstances" of that case, without addressing the antecedent question whether the lack of announcement might render a search unreasonable under other circumstances).
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