ILLEGAL STRIP SEARCH BRINGS $10K AWARD

Female Inmate's Rights Ignored In Body Cavity Search

Prison Staff Ruled Negligent In How They Got Consent

A Toronto woman who murdered her grandmother has been awarded $10,000
in damages after being subjected to an illegal body cavity search as
an inmate at the Grand Valley women's prison in Kitchener.

Prison staff arranged to have Tracy Curry transported to a hospital
and searched for drugs without obtaining her valid consent and were
negligent in the way they treated her, Justice Michel Beaudry of the
Federal Court of Canada said in a ruling released this week.

Grand Valley institution is one five smaller, regional prisons set up
in the aftermath of a notorious 1994 strip search of female inmates
at the former Prison for Women in Kingston.

Ten years ago, in an exhaustive report into that incident,
then-Justice Louise Arbour slammed the federal correctional service
generally for its disregard for the rule of law and said its approach
to body cavity searches was perhaps the most disturbing example of
the lack of respect for individual rights inside prisons.

The searches are to be performed only after staff submit a written
request to the warden and only with the consent of the person to be
searched, she said.

In his decision this week, Beaudry said Curry also had the right to
first speak to a lawyer. The prison's claim that its staff were under
no obligation to inform Curry of her right to counsel is "downright
unreasonable," he said.

"A cavity search is one of the most invasive and humiliating
procedures a human being can be subjected to, and everyone should
have the right to seek legal advice before consenting to it," Beaudry said.

John Hill, Curry's lawyer, said the decision suggests the federal
correctional service "has learned very little" since Arbour's report.

However, things seem to be improving since the arrival of a new
warden at Grand Valley last year, he said.

Curry, formerly Tracy Pegg, pleaded guilty in 1996 to second-degree
murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole for 10
years. She suffocated her 82-year-old grandmother, Alma Smith, with a pillow.

Pegg, who had been using drugs and alcohol at the time, has a
12-year-old daughter and has married while in prison.

The body cavity search took place after Curry, 31, returned to Grand
Valley after spending three days in a halfway house in October 2003
and met up with Skipper, the prison's drug-sniffing dog.

When the canine behaved as though she was smuggling drugs, Curry was
strip-searched and kept in a supervised area for several hours. She
protested and no drugs were found.

She later signed a form consenting to pelvic x-rays and body cavity
searches, which were performed at St. Mary's Hospital. The doctor who
performed the search concluded there were no concealed drugs.

Curry said correctional officers told her if she consented to the
search at the hospital, she could avoid being placed indefinitely in
a "dry cell," a prison room with no plumbing, where staff would check
her excrement for drugs. It was the only reason she agreed to the
search, she said.

However, after returning to the prison from the hospital, she was
subjected to another search by Skipper, who again indicated she was
smuggling drugs. She was strip-searched and placed in a dry-cell
overnight. No drugs were ever found.

Beaudry believed Curry's testimony over that of two correctional officers.

Her consent to the x-ray and body cavity search was obtained "under
inducement," he said.

Curry said she was given a chance to speak to a lawyer only after
waking up the next morning in the cell.

One correctional officer's log book confirms this, Beaudry said.

It's "baffling" how prison staff could think that she smuggled drugs
while under escort between the hospital and prison, Beaudry added,
calling the decision to subject Curry to another dog search upon
entering the prison an "overzealous and rigid adherence to procedure"
which "defied logic."

Hill said the ruling means that prison staff have to "start using
some common sense" and stop "immediately jumping to the conclusion
that a person is guilty."