DN Editorial: BARE MINIMUM: Supreme Court tells human dignity to bend over and spread

THE LONG, robed arm of the Supreme Court has overreached again, this time into a man's underpants.

Last week, the court ruled against a New Jersey man who had been strip-searched, after a traffic stop revealed that he had an unpaid fine - a fine that he had, in fact, paid.

Albert Florence was a passenger in a car driven by his pregnant wife. The police stopped the car, and a check revealed that Florence had an outstanding civil fine. Despite the fact that he had a receipt for the payment in the car's glove compartment, Florence was taken to jail and strip-searched. It took six days and another strip search before charges were dismissed and he was released from jail.

Even without these nightmarish facts - which the court considered irrelevant - the 5-4 decision upholding the right of prison officers to strip-search anyone, for any reason, despite lack of serious charges, is a chilling affront to the Fourth Amendment that protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

The court's majority opinion claims that prison officials have a right to determine how to best manage a prison population, including searches that require someone to strip naked and expose their mouth, nose, ears and genitals to a search, all to uncover contraband. It made no note of the difference between jail populations convicted of crime versus those awaiting adjudication. And it conflicts with standards for strip searches held by many corrections officials, which require reasonable suspicion, including arrests on drug charges or for violent crimes.

Florence's case is not the first time that people have been stripped of their dignity; Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent noted cases involving people searched after driving with a noisy muffler, driving with an inoperable headlight, failing to use a turn signal, riding a bicycle without an audible bell, making an improper left turn and even the strip search of a nun arrested during a demonstration.

Last week's decision is another in a long line of post-9/11 decisions in which "security" outweighs privacy concerns, but the type of invasion that such strip searches can represent - "demeaning, dehumanizing, undignified, humiliating, terrifying," in the words of appeals courts cited in Breyer's dissent - surely writes a new chapter in the erosion of civil liberties, to say nothing of human dignity.

Then again, maybe the last place we should look for protection of human dignity is this court, which granted corporations personhood.

Florence's case is especially disturbing based on one factor that has been little commented on: Florence is black. That was not a factor in the narrow question in front of the court, but it does suggest an explanation for the more nightmarish aspects of Florence's saga: why the car was stopped, why a passenger was subjected to a police-records check, why he was held for six days in jail before seeing a magistrate and why the receipt for the fine payment was not acceptable proof that he had paid the fine.

Both the cops in the case and the justices of the court should do another search - of their consciences and their reason.