It was a little before one in the morning that the Policía Local in Granada decided to search a house for drugs, but they had forgotten something.

The house was on Calle Ruiz del Peral and minutes after bursting through the door they discovered four kilos of hashish resign, 350 dried marihuana branches and 160 seedlings in planting trays.

That was in October, 2018 and case came before the judge last month. The police were pretty conviced that the case was solid; they had the culprits, the incriminating evidence… what more could they need? A search warrant… Oops! The Supreme Court judge threw the case out and the culprits walked free.

They considered that no matter how much wonky weed was being produced in the house, you can’t burst in without a warrant. Elementary, my dear Watson; it’s there in Article 18 of the Spanish Constitution.

You can enter without permission from the owners or a warrant if you believe that a flagrant crime is being committed, with somebody’s life in danger. You can enter if invited by the residents. However, the culprits were arrested outside the dwelling before the police went in without the expressed permission of the occupants.

At the trial in the provincial law courts, the accused were facing 42-month prison sentence and a 30,000-euro fine each, instead they skipped out the court in flagarant joy.

The Public Prosecutor in an appeal to the Provincial Court of Appeals had argued that the house was not a dwelling, but simply a plant nursery – the house had no furniture, for example, therefore it was not an illegal entery into somebody’s abode. But the Appeals judge wasn’t having it.

(News: Metropolitan Area, Granada, Andalucia)