Summary
The Fourth Circuit affirmed the grant of qualified immunity to prison officials sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 over a policy requiring visual strip searches of inmates before and after video visitation. The court assumed without deciding that some searches may have violated the Fourth Amendment but held that the right was not clearly established at the time. The court did not reach supervisory liability because it affirmed qualified immunity.
Topics
Practice areas
Questions Presented
- Whether the blanket policy requiring visual strip searches before and after each video visitation was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
- Whether the alleged Fourth Amendment right violated by the policy was clearly established at the time of the searches, defeating qualified immunity.
- Whether the district court properly granted summary judgment on qualified-immunity grounds.
Holdings
- The Fourth Circuit applies the Bell v. Wolfish balancing test, rather than the Turner v. Safley test, to determine whether a sexually invasive inmate search violates the Fourth Amendment.
- The court assumed without deciding that some of the strip searches, particularly the redundant searches after video visits, were unreasonable and therefore unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
- The alleged right to be free from the challenged repeated strip-search policy was not clearly established in the Fourth Circuit or by a consensus of persuasive authority; therefore, the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity.
Key quotations
“We assume without deciding that some of the strip searches to which Appellant was subjected lacked reasonable justification and thus ran afoul of the Fourth Amendment. But because the reasonableness of those searches was not beyond debate at the time they took place, we affirm the district court’s award of qualified immunity.” (2)
“To determine whether a [strip] search was constitutionally unreasonable, we apply the balancing test adopted by the Supreme Court in Bell.” (10-11)
“Because the alleged constitutional violation was not clearly established in this circuit or among the constellation of other circuit opinions, we must affirm the district court’s grant of qualified immunity to Appellees.” (20-21)
Factual background
Keen Mountain Correctional Center experienced 13 near-fatal opioid overdoses during May and June 2023. Based on anonymous and uncorroborated inmate tips that contraband was being circulated through video-visitation rooms, the warden instituted a policy requiring every inmate using those rooms to undergo a visual strip search before and after each visit. Ingram was strip searched 26 times in one month, although the record contained no instance of contraband being found or of an inmate associated with the video-visitation rooms being linked to drug smuggling.
Procedural history
Ingram sued the warden and a correctional officer, asserting Fourth and Eighth Amendment claims and supervisory liability. The United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment, concluding that the strip-search policy was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, that the searches did not violate the Eighth Amendment, and that supervisory liability could not exist without underlying wrongdoing. The Fourth Circuit affirmed the grant of qualified immunity; Ingram did not appeal the dismissal of his Eighth Amendment claim, and the court did not reach supervisory liability.