Categories | Health & Medicine Article

Search Warrant Allegedly Violated Suspect's Rights

December 15th, 2017 • Health & Medicine • 2 minute read
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Author Sara E. Teller

Search Warrant Allegedly Violated Suspect's Rights

In 2014, when Virginia resident Trey Sims was 17 years old, he was accused of sending an explicit video to his then 15-year-old girlfriend.  Disapproving of their relationship, the girl's mother performed a simple search and discovered the video, reporting Sims to authorities.  He was charged with manufacturing and distributing child pornography.  The girl, who had initiated the exchange by sending nude photographs of herself, was never charged.Sims was first confined to his home and was only allowed to leave to go to school and back. He was barred from using his cell phone or any social media.  Eventually, the charge was dismissed because the court couldn’t prove Sims’ age at the time the video was sent.  However, later, Abbott was instructed to arrest him and hold him at a juvenile center.

Trey Sims, Image Courtesy of Facebook

The district court decided that Labowitz was entitled to immunity and dismissed the complaint, so Sims’ filed an appeal.  This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a reversal of the district court’s position, stating, “Construing the facts in the light most favorable to Sims, a reasonable police officer would have known that attempting to obtain a photograph of a minor child's erect penis, by ordering the child to masturbate in the presence of others, would unlawfully invade the child's right of privacy under the Fourth Amendment.”Labowitz “maintains that Sims failed to produce sufficient facts to support a Fourth Amendment violation because Abbott’s search did not place him at risk of “physical harm, and because the search did not physically invade Sims’ body.”  The appeals court disagreed, responding, “We cannot perceive any circumstance that would justify a police search requiring an individual to masturbate in the presence of others.”

Sources:

Detective violated law when searching teen in ‘sexting’ case, federal appeals court rulesCop 'violated 17-year-old boy's rights' by asking him to 'make his penis erect' so they could take a photo after he was accused of 'sending nude pictures to his 15-year-old girlfriend'
Sara E. Teller

About Sara E. Teller

Sara is a credited freelance writer, editor, contributor, and essayist, as well as a novelist and poet with nearly twenty years of experience. A seasoned publishing professional, she's worked for newspapers, magazines and book publishers in content digitization, editorial, acquisitions and intellectual property. Sara has been an invited speaker at a Careers in Publishing & Authorship event at Michigan State University and a Reading and Writing Instructor at Sylvan Learning Center. She has an MBA degree with a concentration in Marketing and an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, graduating with a 4.2/4.0 GPA. She is also a member of Chi Sigma Iota and a 2020 recipient of the Donald D. Davis scholarship recognizing social responsibility. Sara is certified in children's book writing, HTML coding and social media marketing. Her fifth book, PTSD: Healing from the Inside Out, was released in September 2019 and is available on Amazon. You can find her others books there, too, including Narcissistic Abuse: A Survival Guide, released in December 2017.

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