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Date: December 27, 2017
“Whether the police have the right to force your teenage son to masturbate in front of them in order to incriminate himself is a legal question few parents would think they’d have to consider. And yet Trey Sims’ legal guardians had to do exactly that. In an effort to prosecute the 17-year-old for sexting his 15-year-old girlfriend, Manassas police detective David Abbott obtained a search warrant authorizing him to take “photographs of [Sims’] genitals,” including “a photograph of the suspect’s erect penis.” According to court documents, in the process of executing the search warrant, Abbott took the teenager to a juvenile detention center, took him to a locker room and, with two uniformed, armed officers looking on, ordered Sims to pull down his pants. After taking pictures with his cell phone of the teenager’s genitals, Abbot then ordered the minor to masturbate so that he could take a picture of his erection. Sims tried but failed to comply with the officer’s orders; Abbott later threatened Sims’ lawyer that, if police couldn’t get a picture of the teenager’s erection by forcing the kid to masturbate, he would obtain a photo of the teenager’s engorged genitals by subjecting him to “an erection-producing injection” at a hospital. […] It wasn’t until this month — more than three years after Sims was taken to that locker room — that a federal appeals court issued a decision in his favor: By a divided 2-1 vote, the court held that a reasonable police officer should have known it was unlawful to order a teenage boy to masturbate in front of him and other officers. Notably, though, that meant that one judge felt that police should, indeed, have the right to do force children to masturbate in front of them in order to incriminate themselves. […] Sims’ case shows that we have a system in which the legislative branch is permitted to criminalize whatever it wants, with effectively no judicial oversight; police investigations are invasive, unchecked, and can cause far greater harm than the underlying criminal act; and it is nearly impossible to hold police liable for unlawful misconduct. Until we address those systemic problems, we should expect more tragic cases like this one.” |
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A Teen Sexting Case Revealed How Judges Let Police Invade Children’s Privacy…
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