Thomas Goldstein of Washington, D.C.’s Goldstein & Russell, urged the justices to hold that the Fourth Amendment requires reasonable suspicion for strip searches of all arrestees in order to protect individual integrity and dignity. “What is not subject to a reasonable suspicion standard is anything other than close inspection of a person at arm’s length,” he added.
But Carter Phillips of Sidley Austin and the Obama administration countered that reasonable suspicion should not be required when an arrestee is going to be put into the general prison or jail population. A blanket policy of strip searching those arrestees, Phillips explained, “is designed to ensure not just that no contraband comes into the prison but for the protection of the arrestee as well.”
