By Tom Chaves on April 11, 2012

The U.S. Supreme Court held last week that police have the right to strip search anyone arrested who is in police custody at a station. This decision resolved the split in court authority on the issue as some courts had held that the right to strip search depended on what the person who was in custody was charged with.

The landmark case arose out of a New Jersey case. An African-American man, age 36, from Bordentown in Burlington County had been arrested in connection with a warrant arising out of a fine for a minor violation he supposedly had not paid. He was taken to police headquarters and strip searched. It turned out that he had paid the fine two years earlier and that there should not have been a warrant for his arrest in the first place.

Accordingly, he brought a federal civil rights lawsuit claiming that he had been targeted for being arrested because he was African-American and that an outstanding warrant for failure to pay a fine for a minor violation ticket was not the type of offense which would allow the police to strip search him. The strip search occurred when they were processing him for admittance into the county jail where he sat for six days before his bail was even set.

The U.S. Supreme Court held that regardless of the offense charge that the police have the right to strip search a person when they are going into custody such as at a local police station or county jail. The court found that overall safety of the police and maintaining a safe and secure custodial environment outweighed a person's privacy rights.