Dana Holmes, a 32-year-old Illinois woman, filed a lawsuit against the Lasalle County Sheriff's Department on Monday alleging that four officers illegally strip-searched her and left her nude in her padded-door cell after getting arrested for a DUI, The Huffington Post reported.
Holmes, arrested in May, was brought into a county jail where she was stripped off of her clothes by three male officers and one female before they left her naked in a cell, ABC Chicago reported.
"These are on-duty deputy sheriffs humiliating and groping a female inmate. It makes you wonder, were these guys every trained," said Terry Ekl, who serves as Holmes' attorney. Ekl said that his client was dehumanized, adding that the officers violated a state law; they had to show that an individual is either concealing a weapon or a controlled substance somewhere on his or her body in order to conduct a strip-search.
Also strip-searches must be done by officers of the same sex in an area where they cannot be watched by others not participating in the search, the law stipulated.
"There was no excuse or anything to give them a reason to put their hands on me," Holmes told the Chicago Tribune.
The police report obtained by the Chicago Tribune indicated Holmes was "being mouthy and causing problems," and her blood-alcohol level reportedly registered about three times the legal limit. She pleaded guilty to the DUI charge in July, receiving a probation sentence. But Len Cavise, a criminal procedure expert and instructor at the DePaul University College of Law, underscored that "nothing in the statute says resisting arrest is justification for a strip-search."
