When lawmakers in Annapolis convened last year to push for new restrictions on strip searches by police, an otherwise routine hearing of the Senate Judiciary Proceedings Committee promised gut-wrenching testimony from women who said they'd been victimized.

But none of the women showed up, saying they were too humiliated and embarrassed to testify in public.

The bill passed the Senate, 46-1, but died in a House committee.

Police, who opposed the measure but in the end only quibbled with a few provisions, thought they'd seen the last of the bill: "Criminal procedure - strip search or body cavity search of an arrestee - restrictions."

But the author of last year's failed bid, Sen. James Brochin, a Baltimore County Democrat, has revived the measure as Senate Bill 125, and his committee is scheduled to debate it Tuesday. This time, Brochin said, one of the women - Rosemary Munyiri - will be there to testify.

There is a difference this year compared with last. In 2009, strip searches were front-and-center in the media and in public opinion. Munyiri, a cardiac nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital who said she was strip-searched at the state's booking center after being arrested by city police on a routine traffic stop in 2008, sued the Maryland prison system.

As more people came forward, a federal judge gave the suit class action status, and it is still winding its way through the court system, with no trial date in sight. State authorities have said in court documents they never indiscriminately strip-searched detainees and have denied that Munyiri was similarly treated.

Brochin's bill does not prohibit the practice but limits it to occasions when an officer has a reasonable suspicion that a suspect is hiding either drugs or weapons. It would all but end such searches after routine traffic stops unless police have a good reason to think there is contraband.

"It keeps the standard that if an officer has probable cause, there is not a problem," Brochin said. "But if you pull over someone for a traffic stop, and there's no reason to suspect he's got something on him, the officer just can't take the person's clothes off."

Both he and Sen. Lisa A. Gladden, a Baltimore Democrat and a public defender, have said they've heard dozens of horror stories from people, especially in Baltimore, who say they were stopped while driving or walking and forced by an officer to strip or be subjected to a body-cavity search, sometimes in public.

But police say agencies throughout the state have standards, most based on a Maryland Court of Appeals opinion that found Baltimore County police acted unreasonably when they searched the buttock cheeks of a suspected drug dealer in a public car wash in 2000. The judges said police overstepped because there was no emergency or immediate danger, and the intrusive search, if needed at all, could have waited until everyone got back to a more private station house.

Phil Hinkle, general counsel for the Charles County Sheriff's Department and appointed by Maryland police chiefs to monitor legislation in Annapolis, said he is disappointed that the bill has made a comeback. He said departments have adequate rules to guide officers, and they can be disciplined if they overreach.

"We are basically opposed to it, and our reasoning is that the Court of Appeals has already set the standard on when we can and can't do strip searches on the street," Hinkle said. "It's a policy. It does not need to codify. The court was very explicit about the whole thing."

He complained that Brochin's bill is more restrictive than the court's ruling because he believes it all but bars searches after traffic stops. The sponsoring senator said it doesn't prohibit that practice outright but does set the bar high.

Both Hinkle and Brochin said they were disappointed in the other's position.

They could square off on Tuesday.

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