Cops perform roadside body cavity search after warning, 'You gonna pay for this one, boy,' suit says
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Police in Aiken, South Carolina, pulled over a car because of its temporary license tags and then handcuffed the passenger, called for a drug-sniffing dog, and performed a roadside body cavity search, according to a pending lawsuit. No drugs were ever found.
The incident was captured on dashcam video, though the body cavity search took place off camera, the Washington Post reports. The newspaper discovered the lawsuit (PDF), filed in September 2015, while collecting information for an upcoming investigative series about police abuse in South Carolina.
The temporary tags on the recently purchased car had not expired and were legal, but Officer Chris Medlin nonetheless ordered the driver and passenger out of the car, according to the article, citing allegations in the lawsuit. Medlin told car’s occupants he was calling for police dog because of passenger Elijah Pontoon’s “history.”
“You gonna pay for this one, boy,” Medlin allegedly told Pontoon, who had a lengthy criminal history but only one arrest since 2006 for an alleged “failure to comply.” The officer was white and the car’s occupants were black.
After the police dog found nothing, Medlin directed a female officer to “search her real good,” a reference to the driver, Lakeya Hicks. The search allegedly exposed Hicks’ breasts but turned up no drugs. While patting down Pontoon, Medlin says he discovered something between his legs.
During the anal probe by unknown officers that followed, Pontoon complains the officer is grabbing his hemorrhoids. The officer performing the probe responds at one point, “That don’t feel like no hemorrhoid to me.” No drugs were found.
“For the next three excruciating minutes,” the lawsuit says, officers “continue to probe inside the body cavity and anus of Elijah and continue to insist they are experts as to what hemorrhoids feel like, claim that it is ‘too hard’ to be a hemorrhoid, have their hands and fingers on the ‘unknown object that is too hard to be a hemorrhoid’ yet neither of these two defendants are able to retrieve this “unknown object.’ ”
“At no time during this illegal traffic stop and including up to the time of the filing of this complaint,” the suit says, were the plaintiffs “ever aware of any formal medical training of these two defendants in the field of gastroenterology or proctology so as to be able to form a legitimate opinion as to what would constitute being ‘too hard to be a hemorrhoid.’ ”
At the end of the police stop, Medlin said he called for the police dog because he recognized Pontoon from when he worked narcotics.
According to the Post, Medlin then concluded the traffic stop. “With no contraband and no traffic violation to justify the stop in the first place,” the Post says, “Medlin concluded the stop by giving Hicks a courtesy warning,’ although according to the complaint, there’s no indication of what the warning was actually for. Perhaps it was to warn to steer clear of police officers in Aiken.”
Hat tip to the Marshall Project.
