Woman Says Strip Search After DUI Arrest Went Too Far

 I read an interesting article Woman Says Strip Search After DUI Arrest Went Too Far on abc news where a woman was arrested for drunk driving then was strip searched and treated harshly and it went too far. On May 18th in Illinois Holmes was pulled over by LaSalle county deputies. She had been at a wedding with her boyfriend and he was too drunk to drive. In this article, the police dash cam video shows her calmly taking a field sobriety test. The police say her blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit. She was arrested and taken to the police station for a dui, and that's where things go awry. The video shows Holmes standing against a wall while a female officer pats her down and male officers are standing by. Then all of a sudden the female officer puts her down to the ground in a rough manner, they say because she allegedly tried to kick them. "I was terrified," Holmes said, "I felt helpless. Within moments, deputies carry her into a padded room and shoved her face-down on the floor. Then, three male officers and one female remove all of her clothing, leaving her naked for two minutes, until an officer tosses in some blankets. "I was scared. And I lay there crying," Holmes said. Illinois law says officers can only conduct a strip search when there is a reasonable belief that a suspect has a weapon or drugs, and that they can only be searched by deputies of the same sex. And that it cannot be observed by anyone not physically conducting the search. They were on-duty deputies humiliating and groping a female inmate. It makes you wonder, were these guys ever even trained? This morning, Dana Holmes says her civil rights were violated, and she wants justice. She says she hopes they lose their jobs.
   I agree with Dana Holmes, as to her rights were violated. A strip search is a practice of searching a person for weapons or other contraband suspected of being hidden on their body or inside their clothing, and not found by performing a frisk search, by requiring the person to remove some or all of his or her clothing. None of that applies to Dana Holmes situation. All she was accused of was allegedly trying to kick the officer which you can't even prove from the video. And even if that was the case, she'd been calm the entire time up until then, why not even try another method first before using force? Why thrown her to the ground without a warning? And if she was drunk, she doesn't know exactly what she's doing, and she seriously cannot be a threat, why embarrass her and violate her rights by unlawfully strip searching her for no reason? And even then, strip search her illegally with officers not rendering the search in the room and on top of that, they being of the opposite sex. I agree with Dana Holmes and do believe her rights were violated and that it was wrong.