Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Fourth Amendment

Criminal Law

: Fourth Amendment

Civilly committed SVP subject to strip searches under Bell v. Wolfish

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

A civilly detained sexually violent predator (SVP) can subjected to strip searches the same as criminal detainees. The institutional needs are the same. Wolfenbarger v. Black, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24439 (E.D. Cal. March 26, 2008): Plaintiff first claims that he was strip-searched after his court hearing on July 10, 2002, the day of his arrival at the County Jail for his first period of incarceration at issue in this case. Plaintiff had yet to be officially paroled from Folsom State Prison on that date. SUF, P 2. He was still a penal inmate at this time and the right to be free from strip-searches is limited. There simply is no right to privacy in a prison cell, see Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U.S. 517, 526 (1984), and a prisoner may be subjected to strip-searches and body cavity searches conducted in a reasonable manner...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on March 29, 2008 (boomark / email).