The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled this week that a police officer unlawfully entered a Connecticut man's home while searching for a missing teenager and that the trial court should have granted the defendant's motion to suppress the subsequently discovered evidence, to wit, a large crocodile:

[The officer] testified that based on the facts as he knew them to be, he believed that the missing [teenager] may be in danger inside the house.

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The officers searched the first floor of the house for [the missing teenager] and then proceeded upstairs.  At one point . . . [one of the officers] went into a bathroom on the second floor and noticed what appeared to be a dark figure though the bathtub shower door. ... He testified that he believed the dark figure was the missing [teenager].  In this regard, he testified as follows: I slid the door open to the tub.  To the greatest bit of relief, just a crocodile or a large lizard [was] in the tub. [The officer] estimated that the reptile was six or seven feet in length. 

The defendant was charged with illegal possession of a reptile and risk of injury to a child, but the state's high court ordered that the motion to dismiss be granted and all charges dismissed because the circumstances did not justify the officer's warrantless entry. 

[The officer] closed the shower door, and he and . . . [another officer present] continued to search the rest of the residence for the [teenager]. ... The officers, have completed their search . . . exited the residence and left the reptile still in the bathtub where they found it.

AP story here.  Hat tip to How Appealing.