US: ALITO BACKED SEARCH OF MINOR

Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr., under fire from Democrats
because of his writings on abortion rights, once favored allowing
police to strip-search a 10-year-old girl despite questions about
their warrant. The case, Doe v. Groody, is among dozens of sensitive
topics he wrote about as a federal appeals court judge. It dealt with
police who conducted the strip-search while executing a warrant on
the girl's father -- a suspected methamphetamine dealer.

While the affidavit used to obtain the warrant sought permission to
search all occupants of the house, the wording of the actual warrant
signed by a magistrate only gave permission to search the suspect.

Encountering the suspect, his wife and their 10-year-old daughter
upon entering the house, police called a female officer to the scene
to strip-search the mother and daughter in an upstairs bathroom.

Nothing illegal was found, and the suspect, John Doe, brought suit
against the officers, accusing them of conducting an illegal search
on his wife and daughter because the warrant only authorized a search of him.

Judge Alito dissented from a majority 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals ruling, which found that the search "for evidence beyond the
scope of the warrant and without probable cause violated [the]
clearly established Fourth Amendment rights" of the wife and daughter.

Judge Alito argued that under the "best reading" of the warrant, the
strip-search was authorized. The officers were immune to the lawsuit,
he wrote, because "even if the warrant did not contain such
authorization, a reasonable police officer could certainly have read
the warrant as doing so."

"I share the majority's visceral dislike of the intrusive search of
John Doe's young daughter," he said. "But it is a sad fact that drug
dealers sometimes use children to carry out their business and to
avoid prosecution."

His argument in the case, which came before the 3rd Circuit last
year, has drawn mixed reactions from legal scholars.

"At the very least, it complicates the claim that he somehow is an
originalist or textualist or someone who is resisting liberal
attempts to change the meaning of the Constitution," said Jamin
Raskin of American University's Washington College of Law.

"The Fourth Amendment requires that search warrants describe the
place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized," Mr.
Raskin said. "He was willing to depart from the text of the Fourth
Amendment to allow for much broader police powers in searching people's homes."

Roger Pilon, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the
libertarian Cato Institute, said Judge Alito "seemed to be bending
over backwards to make the best case he could for the police officers."

The concern, he said, "is whether Alito may be too deferential to
government in his approach to cases."

"After all, he has been in government his whole professional life. He
has seen the world largely from the government perspective," Mr.
Pilon said. "This could, and I emphasize could, raise a concern about
how he will read cases once he's on the Supreme Court that pose the
individual against the government."