TRI In The News

Supreme Court OKs 'Visual Rape'

From The Daily Press

Original article available here

Let's say your wife is driving along and gets pulled over because her car has a busted headlight.

Or let's say you're pulled over because your car muffler is too loud.

Or let's say your grown daughter is riding a bicycle without an audible bell.

Then let's say you each get arrested on these minor offenses. (Yes, this has happened.)

Now guess what could happen next.

I'll let this excerpt from a prison manual, quoted by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, take it from here:

"A visual inspection of the inmate's naked body … spreading and/or lifting his testicles to expose the area behind them and bending over and/or spreading the cheeks of his buttocks to expose his anus. For females, the procedures are similar except females must, in addition, squat to expose the vagina."

If you're offended by such graphic language, you'll be more offended when you're told to strip and spread 'em for neglecting to pay a civil fine, driving without a seatbelt or violating a leash law.

For this is the state of affairs after Monday's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that anyone arrested — even for minor violations — may be strip-searched and their body cavities visually inspected before being placed in the general jail population.

Why? For reasons of security, order and efficiency — the rationale of any police state worth its stiff-armed salutes.

Or, as Justice Anthony M. Kennedy rationalized in the majority opinion, for the state's "substantial interest in preventing any new inmate … from putting all who live or work at these institutions at even greater risk when he is admitted to the general population."

No longer do corrections officers need reasonable suspicion that someone poses a true threat or is carrying drugs or weapons.

And no longer can citizens hide behind personal privacy rights.

In fact, we don't even need to be guilty of a crime.

Albert Florence certainly wasn't. Florence is the New Jersey man who was minding his own business back in 2005, riding in the passenger seat of his BMW, his pregnant wife behind the wheel, his young son in the back seat, on their way to Sunday dinner when cops pulled the car over.

They also pulled up a warrant that mistakenly said Florence hadn't paid an old traffic fine. Florence grabbed the documented proof that he had paid the fine from his glove box — he said in a news report he kept it there in case he was ever pulled over by a cop suspicious of a black man driving a nice car.

Florence was taken into custody, anyway. While in custody over seven days, he was forced to strip, lift his genitals and squat and cough in front of government officials. Not once, but twice.

After a magistrate finally ordered him released, Florence sued. The case wended its way to the highest court in the land, where five conservative justices have just turned their anti-government intrusion ethos on its hypocritical little head.

Their decision "not only condones an overreach of state power, but legitimizes what is essentially state-sponsored humiliation and visual rape," wrote John W. Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute, a conservative civil rights advocacy group based in Charlottesville, in a press release Wednesday.

If you think the high court's decision has little bearing on you and that such things only happen in places like New Jersey, think again.

Over the past several years, Peninsula police officers have been accused of and/or sued for putting their hands down the pants, under the bra, around the genitals and up the rectum of citizens after traffic stops. And of taking such actions in public.

In one case, a man claimed a Hampton officer shoved a hard metal object up his rectum while he stood on the side of the road. A judge dismissed the case two years ago, ruling it was filed too late.

In another, the son of a Newport News school board member and retired police officer claimed he was pulled over in a traffic stop, pepper-sprayed and arrested. The son also claimed an officer inserted a finger in his anus while he stood in handcuffs, in public. An internal police investigation ruled the allegations were unfounded.

There have been other allegations. A teenager claimed he was stripped and anally searched by a staff member at a juvenile detention center, and readers have contacted me with their own complaints of alleged improper rectal searches by police.

Police officials have consistently and vigorously refuted such allegations.

Now I guess they needn't bother.