Siding with security needs over privacy rights, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that jailers may subject people arrested for minor offenses to invasive strip searches.This is so depressing. I've come to dread Supreme Court sessions, because the justices will almost surely make mischief and worse, e. g., Citizens United (corporations are people). When will we have lost enough of our rights and privacy in the name of security to say that the terrorists have won?
By a 5-4 vote, the court rejected a challenge from a New Jersey man who argued it's unconstitutional to force everyone to strip down for inspection. Albert Florence was arrested by a state trooper because of an error in the state's records that mistakenly said he was wanted on an outstanding warrant for an unpaid fine. Even if the warrant had been valid, failure to pay a fine is not a crime in New Jersey.
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Siding with security needs over privacy rights, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that jailers may subject people arrested for minor offenses to invasive strip searches.
By a 5-4 vote, the court rejected a challenge from a New Jersey man who argued it's unconstitutional to force everyone to strip down for inspection. Albert Florence was arrested by a state trooper because of an error in the state's records that mistakenly said he was wanted on an outstanding warrant for an unpaid fine. Even if the warrant had been valid, failure to pay a fine is not a crime in New Jersey.
Monday, April 2, 2012
IN THE NAME OF SECURITY
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Depressing and outrageous. If this isn't an "unreasonable search and seizure," in the words of the Constitution, what is, pray tell?
ReplyDeleteFrom the Globe and Mail (Canada):
"Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the four dissenters, said the strip-searches the majority allowed were “a serious affront to human dignity and to individual privacy” and should be used only when there was good reason to do so.
"According to opinions in the lower courts, people may be strip-searched after arrests for violating a leash law, driving without a licence and failing to pay child support. Citing examples from briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, Justice Breyer wrote that people have been subjected to “the humiliation of a visual strip-search” after being arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal and riding a bicycle without an audible bell.
"A nun was strip-searched, he wrote, after an arrest for trespassing during an antiwar demonstration. So were victims of sexual assaults and women who were menstruating."
I wonder how those 5 men in the majority would have voted had it been their wife, their mother, their daughter, put through the humiliation.
I don't recognize these men.... or tis country.
ReplyDeleteStrip search the Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteRuss, thanks for the wise words from Justice Breyer. At least, there are four sane justices on the bench. How unfortunate for the rest of us that the majority did not see fit to follow Breyer in his wisdom. In the judgment of the police, any one of us could be a potential terrorist.
ReplyDeleteWhere were the Tea Partiers to protest this encroachment on our freedoms? Why weren't they out there in the street with their "Liberty!" signs to save us from strip-searches with the same dedication they demonstrated to save us from health care?
This seems to be following the UK example. Police or Customs officers have the power to carry out an invasive strip search of those suspected of committing an offence, such as being a Drugs Mule.
ReplyDeleteNormally, the search is carried out with the agreement of the subject, but can be done forcibly if they don't agree.
I'm not sure of the morality of this, but it's unusual for the USA to follow the UK's lead, it's normally the other way around.
UKViewer, then it's a switcheroo. The UK set the example. The practice surely seems like "unreasonable search and seizure" to me and four justices. Dare I say that now that the majority of the Supremes have spoken?
ReplyDeleteA liberal is a Tea Partier who's been strip searched because their dog was off its leash?
ReplyDeleteBex, excellent. It could happen.
ReplyDeleteThe decision (pdf file) is worse than reported above. The majority's justifications for the "invasive" strip search are specious. Prisoners entering the general prison population are regularly required to shower to avoid bringing lice into the facility, during which time their clothes can be searched. They can be inspected wearing underwear only. They go through metal detectors. Thus the supposed justifications of avoiding infection, checking for gang tattoos, and smuggling contraband (ranging from cigarettes to drugs to weapons) can be dealt with without the necessity of an "invasive" strip search. As the dissent noted: "No one here has offered any reason, example, or empirical evidence suggesting the inadequacy of such practices for detecting injuries, diseases, or tattoos."
ReplyDeleteHere, "invasive" means Mr. Florence "was also required to lift his genitals, turn around, and cough while squatting."
Prior cases required some "reasonable suspicion" by jailers to conduct strip searches. This latest decision means that the whims of the jailers, reasonable or not, are sufficient under what used to be the Constitution.
And, by the bye, Mr. Flores "spent seven days in jail because of a warrant that said, mistakenly, that he was wanted for not paying a court fine. In fact, he had proof that the fine had been paid years earlier; he said he carried it in his glove box because he believed that police were suspicious of black men who drove nice cars."
His crime was evidently being a passenger while black.
Paul (A.), I was going to read the decision until I saw it was 41 pages. I knew that the fine had been paid, and the records were in error. Why didn't the police believe Florence's documentation? Because he was black. Reason no longer applies, because fear rules!
ReplyDeleteIMHO this means that all American citizens are viewed as the enemy and they may be strip searched at will for any reason. Police state?
ReplyDeleteBonnie, I was waiting for someone to mention police state. How will we know when we are there?
ReplyDeleteNot to channel Walter Cronkite, Mimi, but: You Are There.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting comment from blogger Aaron Bady:
". . . we probably shouldn’t put aside the fact that our prison system is overcrowded and underfunded to an outrageous degree. Because when the Supremes start talking about what is and isn’t workable, what they’re really saying is: we can’t afford to provide the kinds of rights which the bill of rights promises. To say that it wouldn’t be workable to treat citizens in custody as still having the rights that no court has yet ruled to strip away — that 'it would be difficult to determine whether individual detainees fall within the proposed exemption' is simply to say that the work of observing constitutional rights, spending the time and money to see that it is done properly, is beyond our powers as a society. It is too difficult. There are, obviously, ways to make prisons more 'secure' which do not involve putting a hand in your anus, and if the Supremes mandated that they find them, they would. It’s just that, given the massive overcrowding of our prisons (and the underfunding which flows out of that overcrowding), a hand in the anus is the cheapest way to do it.
"Or so goes the logic; as Breyer pointed out, there is almost no evidence that strip searching everyone actually provides any meaningful 'security.' But my point is the logic, the mind-set of the people who wrote the decision: when the court refuses to second guess or regulate the extent to which police can probe the bodies of citizens that the police have condemned — in Kennedy’s words 'courts are in no position to second-guess the judgments of correctional officials' — what is happening, pretty explicitly, is the judgement that protecting liberty is too expensive. And this logic is what I think we should be truly concerned about, the ways that a right disappears not because of some crazy theory of 'executive authority,' but simply because it is judged to be more economical to put a gloved hand in your anus than to build enough prisons to compartmentalize inmates by their appropriate juridical status. If your rights can become forfeit because of your behavior — if we accept the basic logic of criminology that certain actions cast you out of the normal bounds of rights-based citizenship — then the shifting line that distinguishes when and how and why your behavior causes that transformation is important to watch. But at least as important is the force that moves it, the fact that Kennedy and company are explicitly pegging that line to the economic necessities of penal institutions, of what is judged — by the penal institutions themselves — to be 'workable.'"
Now that much of the prison system has been taken over by private corporations, that bloc of the Supreme Court that is beholden to the corporatist camp has decided that their masters cannot afford to pay attention to the Constitution. They need that money to try to buy elections and legislators.
Assuming a Republican loss in the next general election, it is time to initiate some impeachment proceedings. Just sayin'.
Not to channel Walter Cronkite, Mimi, but: You Are There.
ReplyDeleteThanks for letting us know, Paul (A.).
So much of what prisoners and the rest of us put up with in the name of security does not make us more secure. Our prisons are a scandal, as are our numbers of people incarcerated, and yet we are a violent country compared to other countries in the West.
Scalia played the clown from what I've heard of the proceedings on both the health care and strip-search arguments thus far, especially during the health care arguments. What kind of behavior is that for a justice in the highest court in the land?
"Assuming a Republican loss in the next general election, it is time to initiate some impeachment proceedings. Just saying'"
ReplyDeleteThank you Paul(A.) Agree with that 100%.
Many have fought and died to preserve our rights. An enormous price. Corporate greed just damages everything it touches.