It’s likely in all three cases that the Border Patrol and Police did nothing illegal.
Unconstitutional? Certainly in the cases of the traffic stops. The searches were “unreasonable”, though had any evidence been found, it may have been admissible anyway ( US vs Grey would imply that - both unreasonability of search, and admissibility nonetheless ). The border search may even be deemed reasonable, if conducted anywhere within 100 miles of the border.
That’s the scariest thing. Not that this happens, but there’s no remedy available to the victims.
New Mexico is home to Roswell, the intergalactic headquarters of alien cavity probes. Of course eventually the native population would start emulating the invaders. It’s part of the culture now. We’ve seen this over and over again throughout history. Who are we to impose our values on the culture of New Mexico?
People who own guns are obvious wacko extremists, people who join militias more so. Worry about US government actions? Don’t worry - I’m sure you can Occupy, sue, or have a good march and they will be really sorry, this will never happen again.
Christ on a crutch… I would be upset but that quota is overfull, it is just sad now as I see my home country turn slowly into something I can no longer be proud of though if you really study history the USA has been a pretty crappy place in a lot of ways. What are they only hiring the gorillas for border and police duty? (though thats probably insulting to real gorillas).
I understand the border patrol has bigger leeway but you know how many times does nothing there need to be verified.
It sounds like you don’t think hi_endian’s question is important, but it is. If you want to stop something, you need to know whether it’s legal or not. Do you sue or put pressure on prosecutors? Or do you protest and look for legislative candidates? It’s kind of a mystery to me why so few people seem interested in whether a given atrocity is legal or not.
EDIT: Ygret, I clicked on your profile and I see from some of your other posts that there are some basic assumptions about the US that you and I don’t share. If I shared your premises I might also not care what’s legal or not. But I’ll leave my thoughts here in case they’re of interest to anyone who shares my belief that our government can be changed.
Not at my medical school in the UK and not in any hospital I’ve worked in over the last 25 years in the UK, Oz and NZ. When I was training we had to go in person and obtain formal written consent for a vaginal exam for teaching purposes from each and every woman we examined. And that’s the way it should be.
Are you saying that pelvic exams without consent do not happen? That those news articles are lying?
Searching indicates that the UK apparently has rules requiring consent for pelvic exams. However, I also found this 2003 article from the British Medical Journal which states:
The teaching of vaginal and rectal examinations poses ethical problems for students and educators, and guidelines exist to protect patients from unethical practice. Yvette Coldicott and colleagues report an exploratory survey, whose findings suggest that best practice is not always followed and that in many cases consent has not been given for procedures.
Although I cannot read the entire article, this book seems to be referring to the BMJ article when it says;
In a study reported in the British Medical Journal whose chief author was a medical student, a survey reporting the experiences of 386 undergraduate medical students showed that among 702 sedated patients who underwent “practice” rectal or pelvic exams by medical students under anesthesia, written permission existed in only 24 percent of the cases, oral permission in about 50 percent, and students reported no permission had been given in 24 percent of the cases. And often, more than one medical student practiced these exams on a sedated patient.
The problem has been that a number of recent court decisions, while individually possibly justifiable, have rendered the 4th amendment almost moot when strung together.
IANAL but…
Warrant validity. Based on the testimony presented by the police, a warrant to search the car and conduct a visual search of the suspect’s anal area was not grossly unreasonable. That is what a “search of the anal cavity” is. Cough and Squat, no more. So no blame on the Magistrate.
There is caselaw (699 P.2d 1078 (1985) State vs Gutierrez) that states that warrants may be executed beyond the county boundaries. So that alone does not invalidate the warrant.
Warrants may be executed only between the hours of 6am to 10pm. However, it could be argued that the warrant was executed from the time the police took the suspect to the first hospital. It’s not clear that the execution must be completed by 10pm, or that different procedures as part of a continued execution might not start later. It’s possible that such a warrant may effectively last as long as the suspect is held in investigative detention, while the police think up new procedures to execute as part of the search.
So the warrant (from the issuing magistrate’s view authorising a visual search of the suspect’s anal area, as well as his car) may be valid.
The police may claim that “in good faith” they thought authorisation for an anal cavity search included the entire digestive tract, and not just visually. The Supreme Court in a 5:4 decision authorised physical probing by prison authorities of incoming inmates - even those arrested for not having working bells on bicycles - so it is not unreasonable for police to assume that when a suspect is not under arrest, but under investigative detention so they can go on fishing expeditions for drugs from a known druggie, the same or even more relaxed standards apply. Wrong (I think), but not insanely so. No more unreasonable than the SCOTUS’s deference to the smooth running of prison administration. Had the suspect been under arrest, it’s clear that different and stricter standards apply.
5 The doctors may also claim that “in good faith” they thought authorisation for a seach “including but not limited to the anal cavity” authorised a search of the entire digestive tract, and not just visually. The McCoy defence : “I’m a doctor, not a lawyer, Jim!”
The fact that this was the second time they’d done this without anyone saying “boo” would support such claims.
I’m very much afraid that although this shocks the conscience, there is no remedy, nor assurance that it won’t happen again. Unconstitutional, yes, but so what? Such actions by police and prison officials happen all the time, because there’s no penalty on the books for unconstitutional actions. For prisons, even civil suits that result in compensation are effectively barred, the best that can be done is extracting a promise not to do it again.
I knew of a situation in a teaching facility where consent was given and women were paid for the exam. They weren’t necessarily patients, just a random sampling from the population. I suppose this is a disturbing way of cutting cost.
I’m not as disturbed as you are. I spent many years well below the poverty line, and was happy to do all sorts of odd “jobs” like this to bring in more money.
if the facility is adhering to all best practices, explaining the procedure completely, paying a reasonable amount of money for the time and inconvenience, then I don’t see that this is so terrible. That’s a lot of "if"s, of course, but the fact that they’ve come up with this solution suggests to me that they are concerned about providing necessary experience to the medical students without breaking any laws or acting in any way unethically. So, to me, this is a reasonable solution.
A data point I’m missing here (maybe it’s not recorded) is:
How often does a second (or third, or fourth, ad nauseum) anal or vaginal search reveal drugs when the first did not?
This question should in no way be construed as justification or rationalization of repeated probes.
We know that in mice and rats and other such creatures, that when their reward for pressing a lever is not based on a set number of events, but is distributed randomly, that extinction of the lever pressing behavior is more delayed than from any other reward schedule.
So now let’s cast the cops as rats (pleasing on at least one level), the anal probing as lever presses, and the finding of drugs as the reward.
Every time that drugs are found on any search except the first moves the reward into the random distribution mode. And that makes it devilishly difficult to get them to quit searching for drugs, especially after they don’t find them the first time.
This may be as much a problem of badly wired reward centers in lower life forms as it is of police misconduct.
