When you go fast, you break things. That’s why, absent an emergency where people’s lives are at risk or a defendant might flee, law enforcement doesn’t go fast. When they do, they run the risk of getting the wrong people. And that’s exactly what federal agents did in Oklahoma last week. They burst into a family’s home early in the morning on Thursday, April 24, and forced a mother and her three daughters, still in their underwear, out into the rain while they conducted their search, according to the family. They were not, however, the people identified in the search warrant, who had moved out two weeks earlier.

So, if the report is accurate, it was sloppy law enforcement work. Agents obtained a search warrant for a home, which requires “fresh” probable cause. Although the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, where Oklahoma is located, doesn’t have an explicit rule for how recent information must be to be fresh, when you’re going to search someone’s home for nondocumentary evidence, for instance, for drugs or guns which can be moved more frequently, judges often want to see probable cause within the last few days or at least the week. At a minimum, the agents had to believe the people they were investigating were concealing evidence of crimes at that location at the time they searched.

. . .

Interviewed afterwards, the woman made a chilling plea: “Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women? A little bit of mercy. Care a little bit about your fellow human, about your fellow citizen, fellow resident. We bleed too. We work. We bleed just like anybody else bleeds. We’re scared. You could see our faces that we were terrified. What makes you so much more worthier of your peace? What makes you so much more worthier of protecting your children? What makes you so much more worthy of your citizenship? What makes you more worthy of safety? Of being given the right that they took from me to protect my daughters?”

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