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Whatever articles of clothing she might have been wearing under the sweater were not for public eyes

As she was being arrested, she “repeatedly” asked the police for a “break and to let her go,” saying she just broke up with a boyfriend and was “having a lot of issues.” She said she was a dental hygienist and helped people, the judge wrote.

It did not work. The male officer handcuffed her behind her back and presented her to McClinchey for a pat-down search, in preparation for taking her to the station where a more thorough search would be done.

D’Andrade was wearing black tights under knee-high boots, and a tight-fitting sweater, which McClinchey unzipped all the way down, disconnecting it at the bottom. She had assumed, wrongly, that there was a shirt underneath, and it took “several moments” to zip it back up, because it snagged. She had not asked D’Andrade if she could unzip her sweater, nor warned her she would. She said the two male officers “watched the whole thing,” and the judge found as fact they were about a metre away.

As the judge put it, D’Andrade “was dressed up … In these circumstances, I find that whatever articles of clothing she might have been wearing under the sweater were not for public eyes. I find that such articles would possess a sufficient degree of privacy that would allow them to be classified as ‘undergarments’ as intended by the Supreme Court in their definition of strip search.”

National Post

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