(This is part of our continuing series of posts highlighting interesting things we find as we review Alito’s judicial opinions. Others are here, here, and here.)
Judge Alito wrote a particularly disturbing dissent in a case involving whether the police can conduct unauthorized strip searches, even when the person being searched is an innocent young girl. In Doe v. Groody, a case decided last year, Alito dissented from the Third Circuit’s opinion finding a police strip search of a woman and her ten-year-old daughter, who were not named in the search warrant, to be a violation of their right against unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. The majority opinion was written by Michael Chertoff, now Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Bush Administration – no raving liberal. Chertoff’s opinion described how the woman and girl were forced to lift their shirts and drop their pants and submit to visual inspection and touching by a female police officer, and found that “the nature of the intrusion is significant.” Judge Alito said he shared the majority’s “visceral dislike of the intrusive search" – but he dissented, and would have held the search permissible.
This dissent certainly belongs high on the list of troubling opinions in the Alito record.
