Does a confidential informant's identity have to be disclosed under Crawford when the police used the CI's information that the defendant was in possession of a gun, and therefore entered the defendant's residence without knocking and announcing?

As I understand Crawford it says a hearsay statement that is testimonial in nature will not be admitted unless the witness testifies and is subject to cross-examination. How does that apply to Rule 508 or McCray situations? Maybe I am missing something.

I would think this would follow the same rule as with other CIs and their identity. If the validity of the warrant is being challenged (particularly as to the no-knock entry) my guess is that the judge is going to make you prove the validity of the CI.

I would note that a no-knock entry is justified under different circumstances than the entry itself. You need probable cause to enter the home, but you only need reasonable suspicion that knocking would be dangerous or futile, or that it would inhibit the investigation of the crime. Richard v Wisconsin, 520 U.S. 385 (1997). Given the fact that a warrant can include hearsay and other things that might not be admissible themselves in court, I don't think Crawford is necessarily implicated if the only thing your CI does for you is get you a no-knock.

It seems to me that you only have to justify the reasonableness of the officer's belief that he needed to enter without knocking. I'm assuming you have probable cause that the person is committing some crime, and then separet/additional information that he is armed, which latter information came from a more questionable source, or a source you don't want burned. I'm guessing that you've either got:
1) a credible source for the threat information which you don't want burned. Given the fact that the threat itself is likely to be irrelevant to the charge you are prosecuting, why should he be revealed when the only effect of his statements was to alter the means of entry, not the dicovery of the evidence?
2) a less credible source which still only impacted the decision of the judge to allow a certain type of entry, but not the entry itself. And the fact that the defendant was probably guilty of some other crime would could lend more credence to the idea that he might be armed, depending on the crime (the Wisconsin case was about a statute that essentially held that all drug offenders were likely to armed.

Seems to me that as long as we are only talking about the no-knock entry, the CI should not be disclosed unless he is also involved in the PC in some way that would require his disclosure. See Patterson v. State138//643 (Dallas 2004) in which Appellant sought the informant's identity to explore the justification for the 'no knock' search warrant. The court held that appellant failed to carry the threshold burden of making a plausible showing of how the informant's information may be important, i.e. important to the drug case, not the issue of whether there were weapons in the house.

[This message was edited by Wes Mau on 05-02-05 at .]