by Patrick H. Moore
Texas troopers in both the Dallas and the Houston areas have sunk to a new low (or perhaps it’s just standard procedure in that part of the country). In a pair of videos posted online, female state law enforcement officers are shown probing the genitals and anal regions of three women they claim to suspect of possessing marijuana. One of the women was pulled over for littering. The other two were stopped for speeding. In one of the videos, a woman is seen bent over and grimacing as an off-camera police officer conducts the search. Before one of the searches, a male officer explains to the “victim” that he is calling a female officer over to do the search“because I ain’t about to get up close and personal with your woman areas.”
In both videos, a male officer asks the women if they have any marijuana in the vehicle and the women state that they do not. The troopers, using the sort of “mind like a steel trap” logic that compromises their integrity, decide that the women must be lying. And if there’s no marijuana lying around in the car, it stands to reason that it must be concealed within the women’s bodily orifices. After all, everyone knows that a lot of women are cruising up and down the Texas highways with the “killer weed” hidden deep within.
In the case of the littering victim, the “trooper logic” probably went something like this:
“Okay. She threw something out the window. Must be drugs. Therefore she must have more drugs. And if the drugs aren’t in the car, they gotta be inside her.”
Now clearly, if you’re driving along the highway carrying weed, you’re not going to throw it out the window just for the fun of it. People carrying weed usually want to hang on to it long enough to smoke it or hand it off to somebody else. They don’t want to just throw it away.
“Wait,” you say. “Perhaps she tossed it after she noticed the tell-tale red light flashing. She didn’t want to get caught with it.”
“Well then,” I say, “if that’s the case, the weed wouldn’t still be in one of her “cavities,” would it?”
Never mind, the troopers were certain that there was weed inside the women. I’m not sure if they were certain“beyond a reasonable doubt” or were merely going by Vegas odds, but they were pretty darned sure it was there. So they called in the female troopers to perform the searches.
In one of the videos, just before conducting her search of one woman’s genitals, the female officer informs the victim that if she“hid something in there, we’re going to find it.”
And it must be noted that in all three cases, the female trooper conducting the search used the same gloved finger to search both the victim’s anus and her vagina.
And although it nearly a moot point, it must be stated that all of this supremely invasive effort turned up not so much as a gram of the killer weed.
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Although police do have broad latitude to search a vehicle when they have probable cause to believe that they will uncover contraband inside it, there is no legal precedent that extends this right to searching the suspects’ intimate parts. The Supreme Court held in a 2009 decision regarding a student who was strip searched by school administrators:
“Both subjective and reasonable societal expectations of personal privacy support the treatment of such a search as categorically distinct, requiring distinct elements of justification on the part of school authorities for going beyond a search of outer clothing and belongings.”
Admittedly, the Supreme Court’s decision rested in part upon factors specific to that case, such as the youth of the person subject to the search. Nevertheless, the Court stressed the fact that the authorities had no “reason to suppose that [the student] was carrying pills in her underwear.” This means that if officials want to conduct an unusually intrusive search into a suspect’s private areas, they must have a case-specific reason to believe that contraband will be found in those private areas. And as I’ve suggested above, it’s very doubtful that Texas troopers had any valid reason to truly believe that the three women searched in these videos were carrying marijuana in their body-cavities.
According to the New York Daily News, one of the officers involved in these incidents, Jennie Bui, was fired on June 29. Another officer, Trooper Kelley Helleson was also fired and charged with two counts of sexual assault. Two of the other officers are believed to be under suspension.
Click on this link for an in-depth discussion of this case and its aftermath.