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Cops do 20,000 no-knock raids a year. Civilians often pay the price when they go wrong.

Most of the time, when a person kills an intruder who breaks into his home, dressed in all black and screaming, the homeowner will avoid jail time. But what happens when the break-in was a no-knock SWAT raid, the intruder was a police officer, and the homeowner has a record?

Turns out that it depends entirely on the prejudices of the jury.

The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from "unreasonable search," meaning police can't bust into your home whenever they feel like it — they need a warrant, granted by a judge. Even a search warrant doesn't give police the right to enter your home by force — they're supposed to knock, announce themselves, and give you a chance to open the door.

But as the war on drugs ramped up in the 1970s and 1980s, police argued that criminals and drug dealers were too dangerous to be granted the typical courtesy of knocking first. In the early 1970s, the federal government made it legal for federal law enforcement agents to conduct no-knock raids — but the law was so widely abused that it was repealed a few years later.

Since then, though, a series of court decisions and state laws have carved out a set of circumstances that make it legal for police to raid a house without announcing their presence beforehand. This has happened at the same time that SWAT teams have proliferated around the country.

Most SWAT teams spend their time carrying out home raids. The ACLU analyzed 818 records of SWAT exercises from police departments around the country in 2011 and 2012. They found that 80 percent of the time, SWAT teams were deployed to execute a search warrant — instead of crises such as hostage situations or active shooters.

thanks to civil asset forfeiture, raiding a home lets cops seize whatever drug money (or other illegal money) is being stored there — and perhaps even the home itself — and use it for their own departments.

It's rare that judges deny warrants for no-knock raids.

Back in 2000, the Denver Post analyzed a year's worth of no-knock warrants and found that judges rejected five out of 163 requests. The Post also found that, 10 percent of the time, a judge would approve a no-knock raid even when police had simply asked for a standard warrant.

In other cases, police have said they need to conduct a no-knock SWAT raid when homeowners have legally registered guns — to the outrage of conservatives and libertarians.

So much for gun rights. Own a gun, the police shoot you on site.

There isn't great data, but the ACLU's analysis showed that about 35 percent of SWAT drug raids turned up contraband, while 36 percent of them turned up nothing. (And 29 percent of SWAT reports didn't mention whether they found anything — a fact police are more likely to omit when they didn't find anything than when they did.) In forced-entry SWAT raids, the "success" rate of actually finding drugs dropped to about a 25 percent.

In 2003, the commissioner of the NYPD estimated that, of the more than 450 no-knock raids the city conducted every month, 10 percent were wrong-door raids. That estimate came after a wrong-door raid resulted in the homeowner's death: when police broke into the home of 57-year-old Alberta Spruill and threw in a flash-bang grenade, the shock gave her a fatal heart attack.

In some of these cases, the target of the raid might reasonably claim self-defense; the law allows a homeowner to defend himself against someone he thinks is an intruder. But unlike when a cop shoots a civilian in a raid, a homeowner doesn't have a police chief on hand to tell a jury that the shooting was justified. So, as Guy's case demonstrates, even though civilians are more likely to get killed in SWAT raids than cops, civilians are the ones more likely to get brought into court for murder.

9 Horrifying Botched Police Raids

Police are often amped up for a SWAT-style raid, and suspects or innocent people behind the wrong door often believe that they are being attacked.

Sometimes they fire a weapon at cops thinking they are being burglarized. Sometimes the cops fire at them because they see something in their hands. Sometimes the police just make elementary mistakes.

What follows is a baleful litany of botched raids that include chainsawing through the door of the wrong address, executing friendly family dogs in front of weeping children and slamming grandmothers into the wall.

Mother watches her door get chainsawed and then gets held at gunpoint in front of her crying daughter. Oops! Wrong Address.

Police break a guy's arm and laugh at him. Turns out he isn't a drug dealer.

Police looking for a stolen X-Box slam a grandmother into the wall and execute two dogs in front of the kids. No stolen goods.

Cops knock. Teenagers open and offer to tie up dog. Police refuse and then shoot it. Arrest one teen. No drugs. No conviction.

Cops in Broward County get a bad address then end up in a guns-drawn standoff with the local judge.

Framingham SWAT Officer shoots and kills an unarmed grandfather while he was laying face down on the floor.

Computer glitch leads NY cops to conduct successive raids on elderly couple's home for 8 years

Minneapolis police burn the flesh off an innocent woman's leg with a flash-bang grenade

SWAT Team puts 22 bullets into a former Marine, while his wife and child cower in a closet. Nothing illegal found.

Even murdering veterans who committed no wrong isn't below the police.

At this point, anyone who says it's just a few bad apples is delusional.