A woman has accused sheriff’s deputies in Texas of sexually assaulting her at a gas station by stripping her and conducting a body cavity search without her consent during a traffic stop.



Charnesia Corley, 21, who is African American, said officers with the Harris County sheriff’s department held her down in a Texaco parking lot and probed her vagina in a search for marijuana.

“They did a manual cavity search. It’s the most serious search you can do under our constitution and should be done in a sterile environment. You sure can’t do it in public by the side of the road. It’s unbelievable,” her attorney, Sam Cammack, told the Guardian on Tuesday.

Corley, who has no criminal record, will file a complaint to the Internal Affairs Division, her attorney said. “I’m doing it right now,” Cammack said, adding that he hoped there was video of the incident.

Corley was pulled over at around 10.30pm on 21 June near Ella Boulevard and Barren Springs Drive in Houston while driving to a store in order, she said, to fetch something for her sick mother.

According to the Harris County sheriff’s office, a deputy pulled her over for running a stop sign. Upon smelling what he believed to be marijuana he handcuffed Corley, placed her in the back of his patrol car and searched her vehicle in vain for the drug.

Upon returning to the patrol car he then allegedly smelled marijuana, concluded Corley had it hidden on her person, and summoned female deputies. One was African American, the other white.

One ordered her on the ground and ordered her to pull her trousers down, Corley told ABC13. “I told her, I said: ‘Well ma’am, I don’t have any underwear on.’ She says: ‘Well that doesn’t matter. Pull your pants down.’”

Corley said she was ordered to open her legs but said she did not wish to do so. “So she says: ‘Well if you don’t open them, I’m going to break them,’” Corley said. “All I could do was just lay there. I felt helpless.”

She told KTRK she felt violated. “I feel like they sexually assaulted me. I really do. I feel disgusted, downgraded, humiliated.”

Corley was charged with resisting arrest and possession of marijuana after deputies allegedly found .02 ounces of marijuana.

The Harris County sheriff’s department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. But a spokesperson told local media the deputies did everything as they should and that Corley had assented to a strip search.

Cammack disputed that and said an officer’s report of the incident, which he had obtained, corroborated his client’s version. The attorney declined to say where the marijuana was found but said police claimed to have found it on Corley’s person. Police usually chose not to prosecute for such tiny amounts of marijuana, he added.

Regardless of what was found, the search violated privacy and the constitution, said Cammack. “They could’ve found a kilo of cocaine insider of her and still should not have done it.”

Rebecca Robertson, legal and policy director of the ACLU of Texas, said a cavity search without a warrant was a “blatant” violation of the fourth amendment, and that an orifice probe was the most invasive search possible.

“A body cavity search without a warrant would be constitutionally suspect. But a body cavity search by the side of the road ... I can’t imagine a circumstance where that would be constitutional,” she told the Houston Chronicle.

She noted previous controversies over cavity searches in Texas. In 2013, the Department of Public Safety was forced to pay $185,000 to two women who alleged troopers had conducted cavity searches by the roadside, illuminated by patrol car headlights, in full view of passing traffic.

Police in Texas came under renewed scrutiny last month over the case of Sandra Bland, an African American woman found dead in her Waller County jail cell after being detained during a traffic stop.