Strip Searches

Strip searches—the removal of an individual's clothing to check for contraband—are among the most obtrusive, [Page 606]invasive searches that governmental agents perform, but there are relatively few U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the subject, and what few there are center largely on searches incident to arrests, searches of prisoners, or searches in school settings. None of these are necessarily dispositive for searches in other situations. In addressing whether strip searches are permissible under the Fourth Amendment, some lower courts, like the Supreme Court, take the position that, absent the presence of one of the exigent exceptions that courts have recognized, strip searches, like other searches, almost always require a warrant. Other courts have focused more generally on considerations of “reasonableness” that may well vary from one situation to another.

Many lower court decisions have addressed issues relative to arrests and detention of suspects. From 1952 to 1980, Chicago enforced a policy of strip-searching all female detainees, regardless of the charges. Although the city had already repealed the policy, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court ruled, in Mary Beth G. v. City of Chicago (7th Cir. 1983), that this policy was unreasonable under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Because the city applied it only to women, it also violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This decision has been cited by other circuits to limit searches of suspected minor offenders, absent individualized suspicion of the concealment of weapons or contraband. Thus, in Fuller v. M.G. Jewelry (9th Cir. 1991), a circuit court decided that allegations of the theft of a ring were insufficient to conduct a warrantless search of a mother and daughter who were known to have viewed the ring shortly before it disappeared. Courts are likely to look with particular disfavor on public strip searches—see Amaechi v. West (4th Cir. 1987)—which are especially intrusive of individual privacy, on searches carried out in a particularly degrading or retaliatory fashion, or on searches that appear to have been utilized simply as a way of humiliating an individual. Such searches might be invalidated as the result of behavior, recognized in Rochin v. California (1952), that “shocks the conscience.”

Although a variety of cases have asserted that individuals do not lose all their rights within prison settings, reasonable expectations of privacy are reduced in such settings, especially in cases where individuals who are confined together might pose threats to one another. Thus, in Bell v. Wolfish (1979), the Court upheld a policy in which arraigned pretrial detainees were required to allow officials to visually inspect their body cavities after every contact visit with an outsider. Similarly, considerations would generally provide authority for strip searches of incoming prisoners who might pose a danger to other prisoners with whom they are housed. Such searches are more likely to pass constitutional scrutiny if they are designed for the purpose of providing security rather than with a general intention of humiliating inmates. In Florence v. Board of Freeholders (2012), the Court upheld the strip search of an arrestee who was being temporarily incarcerated with prison inmates.

...