On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that a strip search is appropriate for any arrest.  The 5-4 ruling (surprise!) stemmed from the following incident:

 The Supreme Court case arose from the arrest of Albert W. Florence in New Jersey in 2005. Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled his wife, April, over for speeding. A records search revealed an outstanding warrant based on an unpaid fine. (The information was wrong; the fine had been paid.)

Mr. Florence was held for a week in jails in two counties, and he was strip-searched twice. There is some dispute about the details but general agreement that he was made to stand naked in front of a guard who required him to move intimate parts of his body. The guards did not touch him.

“Turn around,” Mr. Florence, in an interview last year, recalled being told by jail officials. “Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.”

“I consider myself a man’s man,” said Mr. Florence, a finance executive for a car dealership. “Six-three. Big guy. It was humiliating. It made me feel less than a man.”

leased with an option to tug

Jail isn’t supposed to be enjoyable, especially considering we fill them with every poor asshole suspected of a crime that’s not domestic violence.  But does the punishment fit the crime arrest?  Here’s conflicted Justice Kennedy on behalf of the majority, having a happy:

The question here is whether undoubted security imperatives involved in jail supervision override the assertion that some detainees must be exempt from the more invasive search procedures at issue absent reasonable suspicion of a concealed weapon or other contraband. The Court has held that deference must be given to the officials in charge of the jail unless there is “substantial evidence” demonstrating their response to the situation is exaggerated.

That’s true – never know when a motorist with a busted tail light is really just a Mexiranian terr’ist with a WMD strapped to his taint.  That’s the “reasonable” standard I’ve been taught.  Then again, I went to Catholic school. 

Justice Breyer’s dissent:

I doubt that we seriously disagree about the nature of the strip search or about the serious affront to human dignity and to individual privacy that it presents. The basic question before us is whether such a search is nonetheless justified when an individual arrested for a minor offense is involuntarily placed in the general jail or prison population….

I have found no convincing reason indicating that, in the absence of reasonable suspicion, involuntary strip searches of those arrested for minor offenses are necessary in order to further the penal interests mentioned. And there are strong reasons to believe they are not justified.

The enduring domestic legacy of 9/11 is the gradual evisceration of the 4th + 6th amendments. Hell, let’s throw in 5th, 7th + 8th as well:  just make sure no reasonable 2nd Amendment restrictions are passed - we don’t want the tyrannical government to prevent “totally normal” people from being able to stalk and kill unarmed teenagers walking in their neighborhoods.

Tagged as: activist judges, bill of rights, Constitution, Fourth Amendment, Justice Breyer, justice kennedy, reasonable search, second amendment, supreme court

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