It's usually not smart to forcibly resist an arrest, because law enforcement has more power than the average individual; and from my own experience, once they make a decision to arrest, officers rarely change their mind, or rarely question the validity of a warrant, or authority of a judge...no matter how nicely you ask.
I found information about resisting arrest at Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association in Texas. Mentioned was a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. v Danehy. There were a few other issued discussed, so I won't try to summarize the case. What I didn't expect was this reference to a case from 6 years earlier:
Speaking for the court in United States v. Johnson, 542 F.2d 230, 233 (5th Cir. 1976), Judge Morgan evaluated the current vitality of the common law right to forcibly resist unlawful arrest. He concluded that old Fifth Circuit case law on the subject had been "sapped of its precedential value" by the persuasive authority of decisions from the other courts of appeals. Those decisions recognize that the common law right to resist an arrest that is not based upon probable cause, suited though it may have been to a past era, has no significant role to play in our own society where ready access to the courts is available to redress such police misconduct.
Huh? Ready access to the courts is a fallacy. Immunity from prosecution is a judge-made rule. The decision in United States Supreme Court case, Stump v. Sparkman, in 1971 made it quite difficult to get a judge held accountable for violations of rights. And soon a similar immunity was granted to law enforcement.
There's a whole bunch of cases mentioned at the website Casemine which were cited in United States v. Danehy...many of them from the 1970's.
