Newsbrief:
Maryland
Appeals
Court
Says
Rectal
Search
Too
Much
1/2/04
The Maryland Court of Special
Appeals has thrown out the drug conviction of a man subjected to a rectal
strip search during a traffic stop. Carl Nieves had been sentenced
to 10 years in prison for possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute
after police found small baggies of crack in his rectum.
Nieves was stopped after
the car he was driving rolled back at an intersection and hit a police
car. Nieves neither owned the vehicle nor had a valid driver's license.
What he did have was a record of two previous drug arrests. Based
on those arrests, Hagerstown police conducted a strip search and found
the rocks.
That was too much for the
appeals court, which noted that any search is an invasion of an individual's
privacy, "... but a strip search procedure flies in the face of individual
privacy rights. Strip searches, moreover, particularly intrude upon
the individual's sanctity of his own body." The "extreme intrusiveness"
of strip searches demands well-articulated reasonable suspicion a crime
is being committed, wrote Judge Raymond Thieme. And the factors cited
by Hagerstown police -- Nieves' prior arrests and the fact that the vehicle
was owned by a suspected drug dealer -- did not rise to that level.
"Neither factor alone nor
the combination of the two supports the conclusion that a reasonable suspicion
was present to justify the strip search," the court said. "Where
is the reasonable suspicion that drugs or other contraband are concealed
in the particular place they decided to search? There is none," wrote
Thieme.
Thieme added that the court
was "troubled by the fact that, any time an individual has a prior drug
history, that history alone may be used to justify a strip search of the
individual upon subsequent arrests for minor offenses. Officers on
nothing more than a 'fishing expedition' for narcotics without an articulable
suspicion whatsoever will essentially be given carte blanche to violate
an individual's privacy when arrested for a minor offense," the court noted.
-- END --
Issue #318, 1/2/04
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Newsbrief: Maryland Appeals Court Says Rectal Search Too Much |
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