Opinion ID: 2271465
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Existence of Reasonable Suspicion to Strip Search Scott

Text: The next question is whether, under the totality of circumstances confronting them, the police had a particularized and objective basis amounting to reasonable suspicion that Scott had drugs hidden under his clothing and in his buttocks or anal area. We hold they did. An undercover officer saw Scott reach into the back of his pants at the waist to retrieve a ziplock of apparent crack cocaine. Scott emphasizes that it was only a single ziplock and that we have no evidence of how far down into his pants Scott reached or how long he kept his hand there. But that begs some obvious questions: how was Scott carrying the little ziplock he retrieved from the back of his pants, and was that ziplock the only one he had on him? It is implausible to suppose that Scott merely had placed a single small plastic bag loose in his waistband, or under his pants or underwear, because it would have been too easy for such a little bag to slip or fall and become difficult to reach or even lost. It is at least reasonable to suppose that Scott carried the little ziplock in something, if only to avoid those dangers. [71] In what? Scott did not take the ziplock out of his pocket. The most reasonable surmise would have been that he extracted it from a bigger package of some kind  a package that, by virtue of its larger size and proper positioning, could have stayed hidden between Scott's buttocks, or in some other suitable place under his clothing, without slippage. As Officer Schagnon knew, and as past cases of this and other courts manifest, it is common for drug dealers to carry their wares in just this fashion in their groin or rectal areas. If Scott had been carrying such a package, it was probably still present when the police arrested him, for until then he had no reason and scarcely any time to dispose of it. That the package was not discovered in the superficial field search did not mean it was not there. [72] Furthermore, if Scott was concealing a package that had contained one salable ziplock of cocaine, that package obviously could have been holding ziplocks Scott had not yet managed to sell. The substantial amount of cash found on Scott's person  the possible proceeds of multiple drug sales  lent additional support to the suspicion that he might be carrying more drugs somewhere underneath his pants. Nothing the police knew contradicted that suspicion in Scott's case. We conclude it was a reasonable suspicion for Officer Schagnon and Lieutenant Murphy to pursue via a strip search culminating in a visual body cavity inspection.