Monday, May 11, 2015

the war on drugs has eroded our Fourth Amendment rights and encouraged cops to inflict outrageous indignities on people they suspect of violating pharmacological taboos, but Texas lawmakers are fed up with cops sexually assaulting Texas women. No more roadside body cavity searches without a warrant

Last week the Texas House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill that requires police officers to obtain a warrant before probing the anuses and vaginas of motorists during traffic stops. The fact that the bill was deemed necessary speaks volumes about the way the war on drugs has eroded our Fourth Amendment rights and encouraged cops to inflict outrageous indignities on people they suspect of violating pharmacological taboos.

It is hard to believe that six troopers in three separate traffic stops thought it was reasonable to explore those private areas on the off chance that there might be some pot there. Such judgments can be understood only in the context of a prohibitionist mentality that sees bits of dried vegetable matter as a grave threat to public order. When pot is legalized similar to alcohol, this ought to stop. Cops don't make up bullshit reasons to do body cavity searches on the roadside for airliner liquor bottles.

On Memorial Day in 2012, Alexandria Randle and Brandy Hamilton, both in their 20s, were driving home to Houston from Surfside Beach when they were pulled over for speeding on Highway 288 in Brazoria County. Claiming to smell marijuana, Trooper Nathaniel Turner ordered the women out of the car. After he found a small amount of pot in the car, Turner called a female trooper, Jennie Bui, and asked her to perform a body cavity search on both women. “If you hid something in there, we are going to find it,” Bui says on the dashcam video of the traffic stop. It turned out there was nothing to find. The stop ended with a ticket for possession of drug paraphernalia.

“It was extremely humiliating, especially with my entire family, including my 8-year-old nieces and my nephew…in the back of the car,” Randle told HLN. “They saw all of this happening, as well as everybody on the side of the road.


Randle and Hamilton’s ordeal was not unique. The same month they filed their lawsuit, DPS settled a case brought by two other women, Angel Dobbs and her niece Ashley Dobbs, who were 38 and 24, respectively, when they were stopped for tossing cigarette butts from their car on Highway 161 near Irving in July 2012. (posted about that last year http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2014/02/out-rage-ous-police-actions-in-news-its.html ) Trooper David Farrell claimed to smell marijuana coming from their car and called in a female trooper, Kelley Helleson, to poke around in their private parts. According to the lawsuit, Helleson conducted these “painful, humiliating, and shamefully embarrassing” body cavity searches “on the side of a public freeway illuminated by lights from the police vehicle in full view of the passing public.”

Like Randle and Hamilton, Angel and Ashley Dobbs said the trooper who searched them did not bother to change gloves between assaults. No drugs were found.

the bill that the Texas House passed last week, which was sponsored by Rep. Harold Dutton Jr. (D-Houston) and still needs approval from the state Senate. Dutton’s bill says “a peace officer may not conduct a body cavity search of a person during a traffic stop unless the officer first obtains a search warrant pursuant to this chapter authorizing the body cavity search.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld routine strip searches of arrestees, even people accused of minor offenses such as marijuana possession or failure to wear a seat belt. In those cases the searches, aimed at finding weapons or contraband, took place in jail prior to confinement. But in 2003 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the Fourth Amendment allows warrantless inspection of body cavities in other settings as a “search incident to arrest.”

 The Supreme Court also has indicated that warrantless body cavity searches are permissible near the border as part of the government’s drug interdiction efforts. In a 1985 decision that upheld the detention of a Colombian woman whom customs agents suspected of swallowing balloons filled with cocaine, the Court said “we suggest no view on what level of suspicion, if any, is required for nonroutine border searches such as strip, body-cavity, or involuntary x-ray searches” (emphasis added). In other words, the Court assumed that such searches, aimed at addressing “the veritable national crisis in law enforcement caused by smuggling of illicit narcotics,” do not require probable cause, let alone a warrant.

Texas state Rep. Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock), who is sponsoring another bill aimed at preventing such incidents. “While I have a tremendous amount of respect for our local police and sheriff’s departments, I am concerned about the fact that this could happen to any of us, here or in other parts of the state, as we travel. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right of the people to be secure in their persons, and I believe this bill is a natural reflection of that right.”

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

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