- Today, attorneys for ten women filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in a case charging that South Carolina law enforcement and hospital officials collaborated in a secretive scheme to drug test them and leak their confidential test results to the police. Invoking the Fourth Amendment, which protects all Americans from unlawful searches, attorneys for the women ask the Court to strike down this Search Policy, which was used to arrest pregnant women right out of their hospital beds.
"Transforming a confidential doctor visit into a sting operation for law enforcement is not only an unconstitutional violation of individuals rights, it is also misguided health policy," said Priscilla Smith, Deputy Director of Litigation for the Center for Reproductive Rights, and lead counsel in the case. "Every major medical group opposes punitive policies because they drive women away from pre- and post- natal care, as well as drug treatment," said Smith.
In an unprecedented application of the "special needs" doctrine, which allows the government to conduct searches without meeting the Fourth Amendment's warrant and probable cause requirements, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in July, 1999, that the hospital's search and arrest policy merited an exception because it served a vital public health or safety purpose. However, federal courts have never sanctioned such an exception to Fourth Amendment protections when the search was being conducted to collect criminal evidence. Attorneys for the women asked the Supreme Court to reverse the Fourth Circuit decision.
"Instead of using collected information to provide appropriate care and treatment for drug addiction, medical staff turned it over to the police who arrested pregnant women and new mothers and sent them to jail bound in chains," said Lynn Paltrow, Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a program of the Women's Law Project.
Medical staff at MUSC, a Charleston, South Carolina hospital that served mostly low-income and African American patients, developed the search and arrest policy in October, 1989 with the local police department and the prosecutor's office. A targeted group of pregnant women was subject to urine drug searches, performed without a warrant or consent. The tests were conducted to identify women who had used cocaine so that police could arrest them for the crimes of possession of drugs, child neglect, or distribution of drugs to a person under eighteen, depending on the gestational age of the fetus. Many of the 30 women arrested under the policy - all but one of whom was African American - were seized by police right out of their hospital beds, weak and in pain from having just given birth.
Medical groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the South Carolina Medical Association, filed friend of the court briefs supporting the women. Additional friend of the court briefs were filed by NARAL, the American Civil Liberties Union and NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and the Rutherford Institute.
In addition to the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Women's Law Project, Petitioners are also represented by Philadelphia attorneys David Rudovsky and Seth Kreimer, and Charleston attorney Susan K. Dunn.
The brief filed in the case Ferguson v. City of Charleston (99-936) can be viewed here.
Ferguson v. City of Charleston
