WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court has ruled that a Northern Virginia detective who sought a search warrant to take photos of a teen boy’s genitals as part of a “sexting” investigation violated the boy’s privacy rights.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth District ruled Tuesday that David Abbot, a former detective with the Manassas City Police Department, should have known that the search — would included ordering the teen to pull down his pants and masturbate in front of Abbot and two other detectives — was unreasonable.
The teen at the center of the 2014 case, Trey Sims, was charged with possessing child pornography after police said he sent sexually explicit photos of himself to his 15-year-old girlfriend.
As part of the police investigation, Abbot sought two search warrants allowing him to take photos of Sims’ genitals to use as evidence.
The charges against the teen were eventually dropped, but he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Abbott and Claiborne Richardson, a Prince William County prosecutor who was then the assistant commonwealth attorney, asserting that his constitutional right to privacy was violated.
Abbott was later accused of sexually abusing two other teen boys and killed himself when Prince William County police showed up at his house in 2015 to arrest him. The lawsuit by Sims names the administrator of Abbot’s estate as a defendant.
The appeals court’s decision reverses a district court ruling, which dismissed the teen’s lawsuit on the grounds that the detective was entitled to immunity from the lawsuit because he had lawfully obtained the search warrants allowing him to take photos of the teen’s genitals.
“We cannot perceive any circumstance that would justify a police search requiring an individual to masturbate in the presence of others,” Judge Barbara Milano Keenan said in the 2-3 decision.
The Washington Post first reported the court ruling.
According to the timeline of events laid out in court documents, Abbot ordered the teen to pull down his pants in front of him and two others officers inside a locker room at the county juvenile detention center.
Abbot then ordered the teen to “manipulate his penis to achieve an erection,” which the teen was unable to do, according to court documents.
The next day Abbott sought another search warrant allowing him to take photos of Sims’ erect penis and told the teen that if he could not achieve an erection, he would be taken to a hospital and given an “erection-producing injection,” according to court documents.
“A reasonable police officer would have known that attempting to obtain a photograph of a minor child’s erect penis, by ordering the child to masturbate in the presence of others, would unlawfully invade the child’s right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment,” the court ruled.
The appeals court decision threw out another part of Sims’ lawsuit, which alleged that the teen was himself a child porn victim because Abbot photographed his genitals.
Sims’ lawsuit failed to show that Abbot or the other officers “obtained the photographs of Sims’ body for a lascivious purpose,” the appeals court decision stated.
In a dissent to the overall majority opinion, Judge Robert B. King wrote that a lawfully obtained search warrant “is entitled to be respected and complied with” and that the majority’s decision “could lead law officers to second-guess court orders and avoid judgment calls in gray areas.”
King wrote that in his view “no reasonable police officer” would consider a search warrant allowing officers to take photographs of a teen’s erect penis to “violate a clearly established constitutional right.”
Read the full decision:
Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit by wtopweb on Scribd
