– The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that a ‘Search and Arrest’ policy implemented by a Charleston, SC public hospital, the Medical University of South Carolina, (MUSC), in collaboration with law enforcement violated pregnant patients’ Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. Under the policy, MUSC medical personnel secretly searched a targeted group of pregnant women for evidence of cocaine use without first obtaining warrants. With the hospital’s assistance, police arrested women days or even hours after delivery, removing them from their hospital beds in handcuffs and in shackles. In yesterday’s decision, the court held that the searches violated the Fourth Amendment because patients did not give informed consent to the testing, as they had no knowledge that their doctors were acting as agents of the police and analyzing their urine for evidence of criminal activity.
"This was an insidious program that violated the patients’ expectation of confidentiality in the doctor patient relationship, an expectation that we all take for granted," said Priscilla Smith, Acting Director for the Center for Reproductive Rights' Domestic Program and lead counsel on the case. "Under the guise of providing confidential medical care to their patients, these physicians tricked their patients and disclosed private medical information directly to the police. It’s been a long road for these women, but at long last they are vindicated," added Smith.
Maintaining that the ‘Search and Arrest’ policy violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against search and seizure, the Center for Reproductive Rights argued the case all the way to the Supreme Court last year. The Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision from the Fourth Circuit and held that the tests were subject to constitutional limitations on searches and would be lawful only if the women had consented.
In his majority opinion for the panel, Judge Wilkins wrote, "we hold that no rational jury could conclude, from the evidence presented at trial, that [the patients] gave their informed consent to the taking and testing of their urine for evidence of criminal activity for law enforcement purposes."
The case began more than a decade ago in 1989 when the MUSC collaborated with the Charleston Police Department and local prosecutors to develop the search and arrest policy targeted at group of pregnant women seeking routine medical care. The women were secretly tested for evidence of cocaine use without a warrant or their consent, and positive test results were turned over to police. No other hospital or doctor in Charleston took part in this program. By the time the program ended in 1994, thirty women had been arrested. All but one of them was African American.
Several of the Ferguson plaintiffs testified that the hospital used deceptive strategies: one patient stated that MUSC tricked her into providing urine by telling her that they needed to test her for dehydration; other plaintiffs received the hospital's general hospital information letters after they had been searched for drugs.
In 2000, the Center for Reproductive Rights successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that MUSC's drug testing scheme was dangerous to the women and their children and counterproductive because it deterred women from seeking medical care. In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, stressed the importance of the private doctor-patient relationship and found that the scheme violated the patients’ constitutional rights to be free of unreasonable search and seizure if the women did not consent.
In addition to the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Petitioners are also represented by the Women’s Law Project, Philadelphia attorneys David Rudovsky and Seth Kreimer, attorney Lynn Paltrow and Charleston attorney Susan K. Dunn.
For more background on this case, see Ferguson v. City of Charleston
