Court Opinion

ID: 9574766
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:07:55.837552+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:44:58.678877
License: Public Domain

GRABER, Circuit Judge,
specially concurring:
I concur specially in the result because, although I agree with Parts I and II of the dissent, I part company with its conclusion in Part III that the unconstitutionality of San Francisco’s strip-search policy was clearly established at the time of the events in question.
The most relevant Supreme Court case, Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979), approved an across-the-board policy to strip-search inmates following every contact visit with an outsider. By definition, a newly arrested person, similarly, has just been an outsider.
Moreover, as the dissent acknowledges, some categories of pretrial detainees (such as those with a criminal record and those arrested for violent offenses and drug of*989fenses) do pose a significant risk of bringing contraband into the jail. Those categories of people may, constitutionally, be strip-searched before entering the general jail population. That procedure, in fact, protects people like the named plaintiffs who unwillingly find themselves in the same facility as more dangerous detainees.
Finally, none of our prior cases was sufficiently similar to this one to signal unequivocally that the San Francisco policy was improper.
Although I agree fully with the dissent’s constitutional analysis and with the distinctions that the dissent draws between Bell and this situation, I cannot say that the unconstitutionality of this policy was clearly established before January 2004.
Accordingly, I concur in the result, but not the reasoning, of the majority opinion.