I would like to briefly interrupt this series on the definition of liberty to bring you a passage by Blackstone concerning arrests and home entries by police officers:
“An arrest must be by corporal seising or touching the defendant's body; after which the bailiff may justify breaking open the house in which he is, to take him; otherwise he has no such power; but must watch his opportunity to arrest him. For every man's house is looked upon by the law to be his castle of defence and asylum, wherein he should suffer no violence. Which principle is carried so far in the civil law, that for the most part not so much as a common citation or summons, much less an arrest, can be executed upon a man within his own walls.”
Although this passage (unlike others that I have found and posted) does not directly relate to the central issue in the Barnes decisions of the Indiana Supreme Court, last year, it does show how distant the Court's new doctrine is from the principles and concerns of the common law (which neither the people of this state nor our representatives have ever authorized the Court to replace or destroy).
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