Court Opinion

ID: 9483963
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:36:38.017063+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:56.358444
License: Public Domain

NOONAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur in Judge O’Scannlain’s opinion and add: The prison warden has not ordered his male guards to conduct cavity searches of his women prisoners. Why? It is surely no less deprivation of an employment opportunity for the men. It is surely no less an extra duty for the female officers. It would surely improve security for such searches to be conducted by both sexes. As Judge Trott has observed, prisoners are adept at concealment in their private parts. But common sense, or rather, common decency has told the warden that no one could stomach such gross sexual contacts between male guards and women prisoners. Naked genitalia of one gender cannot be routinely inspected by guards of the other gender. Indecency of this kind is beyond our expectation as a society and beyond what the Constitution countenances.
The plain fact is that the searches at issue here are not essentially different. They are searches of women’s genitalia, breasts and buttocks by men—inspections not conducted by consent with a therapeutic purpose, but police operations carried out on persons powerless to object and not only commanded to cooperate by unbuttoning their blouses, removing their belts, taking off their shoes, and raising their legs, but searched and shoved and squeezed in those areas of their bodies that have the closest connection with their sex. That the women are partially clothed does not alter the areas that are explored. That the prison officials should call these probings “pat downs”—a preposterous misdescription as Judge O’Scannlain’s opinion makes clear— underlines the indifference to decency with which the prison warden has proceeded.
Is indecent treatment cruel and unusual in the sense of the Constitution? Standards of decency derive from normal conduct. The indecent is a breach of the norm, is the unusual. The indecent is not necessarily cruel, but when indecency is inflicted by men on powerless women it has the sexual character that manifests the sadistic. It is cruel.
Under the criminal code of the state of Washington sexual contact with the genitalia, breasts or buttocks of another person is a Class B felony. Matter of Welfare of Adams, 24 Wash.App. 517, 601 P.2d 995 (1979); 9A Wash.Rev.Code Ann. § 44.100. Even though “the community standards of decency, propriety and morality have degenerated markedly” since 1939, Adams, 601 P.2d at 997 n. 2, the sexual touching of such areas of another person’s body constitutes the crime of “indecent liberties.” Id.
Under Washington law it makes no difference that the touching is done through the clothing. Adams, 601 P.2d at 997. In reaching this result the Washington court cited similar conclusions reached by an Oregon appellate court, State v. Buller, 31 Or.App. 889, 571 P.2d 1263 (1977); by the Utah Supreme Court, State v. Peterson, 560 P.2d 1387 (Utah 1977), upholding a conviction of "forcible sexual abuse" where the defendant had touched the vaginal area of the victim through her slip, the court defining the forbidden touching in dictionary terms as including "to examine by *1544feeling with the fingers"; and People v. Thomas, 91 Misc.2d 724, 398 N.Y.S.2d 821 (N.Y.Crim.Ct.1977), where District Attorney Robert Morgenthau successfully prosecuted for the misdemeanor of "sexual contact," N.Y.Penal Law § 130.01(3), a male IRT rush-hour rider who squeezed a female passenger’s clothed buttocks.
Under prior Washington law, such contacts would not have been criminal unless done "for the purpose of gratifying sexual desire." State v. Wilson, 56 Wash.App. 63, 782 P.2d 224, 227 (1989). The statute, as amended in 1988, has eliminated this language. 9A Wash.Rev.Code Ann. § 44.100 (West Supp.1992). It is an open question whether that purpose could still be read into the statute’s continuing requirement of "sexual contact." We do know that under Adams the touching is criminal whether the woman touched is naked or clothed. The crime is complete "when the other person is incapable of consent by reason of being mentally defective, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless," 9A Wash.Rev.Code Ann., § 44.100(b). It is fair to say that prisoners are physically helpless. We do know that the criminal law that protects the unimprisoned part of the state’s population is not suspended in the state’s prisons.
But our task is not to determine if the guards’ contacts would be criminal—helpful though the criminal law is in reflecting community standards of decency—but to determine if this cruel and unusual conduct is unconstitutional punishment. The warden focussed on the needs of his prison’s administration. Does that fact save him?
The Framers were familiar from their wartime experience of British prisons with the kind of cruel punishment administered by a warden with the mentality of a Captain Bligh. See Robert Troup Affidavit (Jan. 17, 1777), in A Salute To Courage, at 66 (Dennis P. Ryan, ed. 1979). But they were also familiar with the cruelty that came from bureaucratic indifference to the conditions of confinement. See Letter from Robert Morris, George Clymer and George Walton to George Washington (Jan. 7, 1777), in 1 Correspondence of the American Revolution, at 324-326 (Jared Sparks, ed. 1853); Letter from Benjamin Lincoln to George Washington (Sept. 25, 1780), 3 Correspondence of the American Revolution at 96-98; Troup Affidavit, supra, at 67. The Framers understood that cruel and unusual punishment can be administered by the failure of those in charge to give heed to the impact of their actions on those within their care.
A bland American civil servant can be as much of a beast as a ferocious concentration camp guard if he does not think about what his actions are doing. Single-minded Inspector Javert is a monster, even though he focused only on his duty. Half the cruelties of human history have been inflicted by conscientious servants of the state. The mildest of bureaucrats can be a brute if he does not raise his eyes from his task and consider the human beings on whom he is having an impact. Here the blind spot in the warden’s mind—his inability or unwillingness to take into account the indecencies he was commanding his male guards to commit—constituted indifference, indifference to the suffering he was going to inflict on the helpless persons placed within his responsibility. Such indifference was wanton and it was obdurately maintained even when a flood of light was cast on the subject. It was unconstitutional punishment.
How did a civilized country and a civilized state like Washington get into this fix where it takes federal judges to tell a responsible state official to stop his approval of indecency because he is violating the Constitution? By blindly going down an egalitarian path premised on the belief that there are no real differences between the sexes, that we must march to a unisex world. In the necessary effort to eliminate discrimination based on gender there has been a simpleminded effort to eliminate gender. But we are en-gendered persons.
There should not be male guards at a women’s prison. There should not be a male superintendent of a women’s prison. Our statutes should not be construed to require such mechanical suppression of the recognition that in our culture such a rela*1545tion between men in power and women in prison leads to difficulties, temptations, abuse, and finally to cruel and unusual punishment. That is the broader context of this case.
We, however, are not asked to reform the prison system of Washington, and the constitution does not assign us such a role. Our task is narrower and wholly within our constitutional competence. It has been confided to the federal courts to say when those imprisoned by the state are being subjected by the state to indecent acts, cruel and unusual and punitive. It is the genius of our Constitution to impose on one part of government the duty to protect from excess those under the power of another part of government. At the very bottom of the social scale, in a prison, we must halt a mindless process that disregarding our moral culture and our human nature also oversteps the boundaries set by our fundamental law.