State Supreme Court

Modifies Property Search Rules

HARTFORD (AP) – The state Supreme Court has modified rules governing prosecution of a suspect for a crime committed while police illegally enter or search property.

In a unanimous ruling released Monday, the court said evidence of criminal behavior while resisting an illegal search could form the basis of a new crime that is beyond the protections of the so-called exclusionary rule.

 “Although wrongfully on the premises, officers do not thereby become unprotected legal targets,” Connecticut Justice Joette Katz wrote. “Indeed, there is a great risk of escalating violence when citizens are permitted to use, or threaten to use, force to respond to unlawful police conduct.”

The court overruled a portion of a ruling it issued in 1983 and rulings arising from it. The justices 20 years ago reversed the conviction of a man who raised his fist to an officer who had entered his home under false pretenses. The court based its decision on the common law right to resist “an unlawful, warrantless entry into one’s home.”

The ruling will not retroactively apply to an East Hartford man at the center of Monday’s ruling. Justices ruled that enforcing its decision retroactively would violate the constitutional rights of Anthony J. Brocuglio. He was convicted on two counts of interfering with a police officer and sentenced to a year in prison and a $1,500 fine in an incident at his home Sept. 27, 1996.

Two East Hartford police officers were on Brocuglio’s property to ticket unregistered and abandoned vehicles but without an administrative or criminal search warrant.

A fight ensued, and one officer was scratched on his face and Brocuglio suffered a shattered eye socket.

The Appellate Court ruled that Brocuglio’s conduct constituted an ongoing resistance to the illegal search and his threats to the officers should have been barred from evidence.

Prosecutors argued – and the state Supreme Court has now agreed – that Brocuglio’s conduct rose to the level of a new crime that should not be protected by the exclusionary rule.