This case is about an arresting officer’s investigatory strip search for the purpose of discovering drugs on persons who had been arrested lawfully but had been arrested for offenses that were not drug crimes.
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We mainly must decide two issues. Whether the strip searches performed on Plaintiffs violated their rights under the United States Constitution and, if so, whether that right -- given the circumstances facing Officer Stephens -- was already so clearly established that every objectively reasonable officer would have known that Defendant was violating federal law at the time. We conclude that the strip search here violated two rights of Plaintiffs, both arising under the Fourth Amendment. First, the strip searches -- as a post-arrest criminal investigation -- were unreasonable, because they were not supported by a reasonable suspicion of the existence of drug evidence. Second, even if some strip search might have been lawful, the manner in which these strip searches were performed was also unreasonable as a matter of federal law. In addition, we conclude that the right to be free altogether of a strip search was, under the circumstances, not already clearly established at the time of the incident, but that the Fourth Amendment itself provided, at the time, sufficient notice that the manner of these particular searches was “unreasonable” in the constitutional sense.
Evans v. City of Zebulon, Georgia, No. 02-16424 (11th Cir. May 9, 2005) (en banc).
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