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In Brief: Woman Awarded $40K in 2011 Strip-Search Lawsuit
Jesse Tabit April 22, 2015
A Frontier Airlines passenger who filed a lawsuit claiming she was profiled and humiliated after being strip-searched at Detroit Metropolitan Airport (DTW) in 2011 will be awarded $40,000. Shoshana Hebshi was pulled from her flight on the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks and allegedly forced to undress as part of an hours-long search.
Hebishi filed the suit against the airline, the Wayne County Airport Authority and the TSA. She says she chose to sue because she “didn’t want others to experience the kind of unnecessary trauma” that she did, and the verdict has given her “faith that the justice system can work to protect constitutional rights.”
For more information on this story, visit ABC News.
Wouldn't profiling be the correct approach in determining who gets searched? And for the assertion that prejudice or even racism or the likes was the sole factor for the search ... would that not require numerous searches? The search approach itself however, does indeed sound more than inappropriate.
Being seized and searched are indeed traumas, ones which must be minimized. Whenever is done in an arbitrary manner it must be condemned. But here it appears it wasn't arbitrary, it was intentional and based on prejudice. I do hope that the airline, in addition to correcting its training, has dismissed the agents involved. One would be remiss, however, not to point out that besides prejudice this story involves another social evil - viz. shame of the nude body; no person should ever feel shame from being without clothes. One hopes that Hebshi feels no trauma from being nude and that her outrage is entirely at being lawfully detained and searched.