NC: Roadside strip search was conducted reasonably

Defendant’s roadside “strip search” was reasonable in its justification and how it was conducted. There was a lump in his groin area found during a patdown that was apparently the source of marijuana odor coming from his person. State v. Johnson, 2013 N.C. App. LEXIS 136 (February 5, 2013):

Having concluded that there was a specific basis for believing that contraband was present in defendant’s undergarments, the next question is whether the searching officers took reasonable steps to protect defendant’s privacy. See Robinson, __ N.C. App. at __, 727 S.E.2d at 723. Here, the troopers placed defendant on the side of Trooper Hicks’s vehicle so that the vehicle blocked them from the travel lanes of the highway and formed a wall around defendant as he was being searched so that he could not be seen by passers-by. The troopers never actually removed or pulled down his pants and never examined any of his “private parts”. Defendant was wearing two layers of clothing underneath his pants. The first layer was a pair of boxer-briefs of the type found in the passenger compartment of his car. Underneath the boxer-briefs, defendant was wearing athletic-style compression shorts with a compartment for a protective cup. The only private areas subjected to search by the troopers remained covered by defendant’s compression shorts and they did not remove his pants or outer underwear to retrieve the package from his pants.

We hold that these facts, as found by the trial court, support the trial court’s conclusion that “[t]he troopers took necessary and reasonable precautions to guard against any public exposure of defendant’s private areas during the search of his person, and the search of his private areas was not constitutionally intolerable in its intensity or scope.” Therefore, we affirm the trial court’s order denying defendant’s motion to suppress the evidence seized from his person.