Cengage Advantage Books: Fundamentals of Business Law 9th Edition by Roger LeRoy Miller

Exercise 15

Fourth Amendment. While awaiting trial, Charles E. Byrd was held in a minimum-security jail. Several fights had broken out at the jail, and the guards suspected that some of the inmates possessed contraband. One day, a team of officers wearing T-shirts and jeans showed up at the jail. They ordered the inmates to form a line and then took several inmates at a time into a room for a strip search. Byrd was ordered to remove all his clothing except his boxer shorts. A female officer searched Byrd while several male officers stood by watching. During the search, the officer felt around Byrd's inner and outer thighs, felt across his genitals on the outside of his boxer shorts, and squeezed his buttocks to check his anus for drugs. Byrd later filed a grievance with the jail and then a lawsuit against the sheriff's department, claiming that the search was unreasonable and violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Is a cross-gender strip search constitutionally unreasonable if no immediate emergency exists? Why or why not? When would such a search be permissible? [ Byrd v. Maricopa County Sheriff's Department, 629 F.3d. 1135 (9th Cir. 2011)]