Where do the courts draw the line at “unreasonable search and seizure” ..I mean this was an innocent man and it was over a traffic fine that had been paid. He did appeal it to the district court and won but it went all the way to the Supreme Court and he lost...5 to 4 ruling.
The problem is that he sued the wrong people for the wrong reasons. He should have sued for wrongful arrest because he had proof of the paid fine. He could have alleged racism in the arrest as well. Instead, the SCOTUS hears a case on whether a person can be strip-searched for minor offenses. They ruled that they can. This poor dude's innocence was never a factor.
Well, police need a court order to take your blood for a DUI test, involuntary, and I would think it would be obvious they would need a court order to conduct a body cavity search.
My opinion is that he sued the wrong party. The jailers did nothing to him. They merely searched him as they search anyone who in arrested and introduced into the jail. I can assure him that were he arrested and put in a jail where they jailers were not allowed to fully search everyone, more than his dignity would have been at risk.
The party that wronged him was the part of the government that made the error. But maybe he was not allowed to sue them?
Personally, I think a huge mistake after the American revolution was the founders or the courts allowing sovereign immunity to continue. Doing away with the king being better than us, for example not subject to tort law, was what the revolution was all about. Yet sovereign immunity was taken that whole cloth from the British system and I guess other sovereigns in Europe.
If any level of government harms a private citizen, that level of government and the individual who committed the harm should be made to play including individual liability.
Can you imagine how much smaller, more careful and circumspect government would be if in the ordinary course of business they were subject to tort liability like the rest of us?
This guy was wronged by the system when it sent him to jail for a ticket he paid. He wasn’t wronged by the prison policy to strip search all prisoners who enter the facility. I bet his family would be suing the prison if he was shot by a gun that was smuggled into the facility.