North Carolina Court of Appeals Issues Ruling on a Strip Search by Law Enforcement Officers

In 2013, I wrote two posts on strip searches by law enforcement officers, which are available here and here. This post discusses the first published North Carolina appellate court strip search case since these posts: State v. Collins, 2016 WL 385690 (N.C. App., Feb. 2, 2016). Collins is only the ninth published state appellate case on strip searches by law enforcement officers. The prior eight cases engendered dissenting or concurring opinions in half of them. Although the United States Supreme Court has decided cases involving strip searches in jails and schools (Jamie Markham wrote a 2012 post on strip searches in jails here), it has not decided a strip search case by law enforcement officers. So it is not surprising that North Carolina’s appellate court justices and judges have been divided on this issue given the lack of guidance from the United States Supreme Court. Facts and court proceedings in Collins. When officers in Winston-Salem entered a residence on December 13, 2012, to serve an arrest warrant on someone other than the defendant, they smelled the odor of burnt marijuana. When the defendant was located upstairs in the home, an officer smelled marijuana on his person. The officer patted down and searched the defendant, including examining the contents of his pockets; nothing was found. The defendant was then taken downstairs. Although the defendant initially gave a false name to the officers, once they determined his real name, they found out that he had an outstanding arrest warrant from New York for [...]