The Maryland attorney general's office will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that said a Baltimore County police officer acted unreasonably by searching the buttocks cheeks of a suspected drug dealer in a public place.
"There are differing opinions regarding what constitutes a strip search and under what circumstances a strip or a reach-in search is permissible as a search incident to arrest," Kathryn Grill Graeff, chief of criminal appeals for the attorney general, said yesterday.
The attorney general's request must be filed by early September. The Supreme Court could decide as early as November whether to hear the case.
In June, a divided Maryland Court of Appeals invalidated the 2000 search of John A. Paulino, now 28, done at night at a car wash. Acting on a tip, police reached into Paulino's low-slung pants and pulled drugs hidden between his buttocks cheeks, according to court briefs.
His trial lawyer said at the time that with the search thrown out, the 2001 conviction of possession of drugs with intent to sell could not stand.
The four-judge majority ruled that the search was not an emergency and should not have been done with others present.
Three judges said that decision tied the hands of police. One judge wrote that with Paulino wearing his pants so low that part of his buttocks was exposed, he "obviously has no expectation of privacy sufficient to prohibit a police officer from also looking."