The Obama appointee urged lower courts to consider alternatives to searches that she called degrading and inhumane, while also dissenting over a man’s shackling in a trial that sent him to death row.
Sonia Sotomayor begins Senate confirmation hearings on July 13, 2009. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Congress via Courthouse News)
WASHINGTON (CN) Announcing the Supreme Court’s rejection of a case where jail officials searched the anus and vagina of an accused shoplifter, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she did not turn down the case lightly but that the issue requires more input from other courts.
The arrestee Sharon Brown described her ordeal in a petition for certiorari, saying jail officials in Polk County, Wisconsin, had subjected her to the invasive search after her 2017 shoplifting arrest based solely on the speculation of fellow detainees that she was hiding drugs. When a hospital ultrasound detected no foreign objects, the officials then directed a male doctor to don a headlam