Strip-searched for Drinking Beer

Note that no one involved in this blatant case of state-sanctioned sexual abuse of two children has been fired, much less arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned.

Apparently that's because the guards were following orders, their supervisors didn't know what the guards were doing, state officials didn't know what the policy was and the department commissioner has been allowed to retire.

As a Kentucky taxpayer, I sincerely hope the parents of these molested teens take the state for millions.

Jennifer Hewlett at the Herald:

A federal judge has ruled that a Kentucky juvenile detention center's screening of two Perry County teen half-siblings while they were naked was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure.

U.S. Senior District Judge Karl S. Forester made the ruling June 14 in a 23-page document that also addresses other legal issues in the case, which stems from the intake screenings of the two juveniles at the Breathitt Regional Juvenile Detention Center in 2009. The teens were jailed after being charged with underage drinking, charges that were later dismissed.

The parents of the Perry County teens filed suit against the two jail guards who conducted the screenings, Mitchell Gabbard and Rebecca Harvey; Breathitt detention center director Gary Sewell, superintendent Gary Drake and assistant superintendent Jeff Voyles; then-Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice commissioner J. Ronald Haws; and then-deputy state juvenile justice commissioner A. Hasan Davis.

The two were arrested for "public intoxication," a ridiculous charge that cops use as an excuse to grab and intimidate anyone they don't like.

At the very least, I hope this disabuses everyone of the notion that juvenile detention facilities are "kiddie jails." They are full-fledged prisons, complete with locked-down, windowless, solitary-confinement cells; mandatory silence and sexually predatious staff.