Bend Over

Trey Smith

But seriously, we have really reached a pretty grim point when the court that is supposed to be protecting our rights under the Constitution, and the president, who is supposed to uphold and defend that document, collude in saying that once a person has been taken into custody by police, she or he really has no rights. The 4th Amendment about being “secure in your person”? Forget it. The cops can now strip you, grope you, check your butthole and humiliate you all they want, even if you are innocent of any charge. And by the way, they can lock you up with hardened convicts and hold you after they do that, until you get a lawyer or post bail.

No “cruel and unusual punishment”? Well, I think most people would agree that getting stripped and intimately searched by some leering cop when you hadn’t done anything would qualify as punishment, and it certainly is cruel, so the Eighth Amendment is in the toilet too. (We already knew the First Amendment -- the one about freedom of speech and assembly and the right to petition over grievances -- was toast. Just ask Mayor Mike Bloomberg or any of the other mayors who ordered the brutal crushing of dozens of Occupation encampments over the past half year.)

As for that old relic of British Common Law, “innocent until proven guilty,” which supposedly is imbedded in our legal system, forget it, too. Justice (sic) Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the court’s majority opinion, drove a stake through that foundation principle of jurisprudence when he wrote that “The search procedures [at issue in the trial] struck a reasonable balance between inmate privacy and the needs of the institutions.” Kennedy’s opinion, which must have jurists like Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas puking in their graves...
~ from Hi-Ho! The US is a Police State by Dave Lindorff ~

Ya know, democracy is growing more bleak by the day. It was bad enough when Congress and the President signed off on the idea of murdering US citizens without due process, but this takes the cake! The assassination of citizens by our own government won't impact most people -- I don't envision US "hit squads" roaming the countryside -- but people are arrested, cited and ticketed regularly. This decision could impact tens of thousands of us each year.

And here's the key point. It doesn't matter if we are guilty of a crime or not. People are arrested everyday who are later released because of a lack of evidence OR it is determined that they aren't guilty of any of the charges. Heck, it's not uncommon for the police to make mistakes by arresting the wrong person!

Once in custody, guilty or not, we can now be LEGALLY strip searched. The police don't need a reason to do it other than they can do it and, believe you me, they are going to do it.

Think about this notion in a personal, not an academic, sense. Imagine that you get into a disagreement with a boisterous neighbor. He calls the local police department to say that you physically assaulted him. Of course, you didn't touch him, but the police believe his story. They come out to arrest you and take you downtown to be booked.

It's humiliating enough that you must sit for a mugshot and be fingerprinted. Next, the police order you into a room to disrobe and then they poke and prod your "private areas."

After you post bail -- if you are THAT lucky -- the police decide to drop the charges. After further investigation, they determine you didn't assault your neighbor and, in fact, he was the aggressor. Yes, they MAY apologize for arresting you, but that will in no way remove the humiliation of the strip search. You will have to live with it.

You will become one of thousands (or tens of thousands) who simply have to live with it!

Is this the kind of nation you want to live in?

P.S. The Obama administration -- the so-called bastions of American liberalism -- argued IN FAVOR of this decision.