Public strip search by Boston police leads to battle over evidence

The Massachusetts Appeals Court has sided with a man who said Boston police subjected him to an unjustified public strip search when they allegedly found drugs in his underwear during a 2021 traffic stop.

Lyriq Rivera was charged with one count each of fentanyl and cocaine trafficking in connection with a Jan. 15, 2021 traffic stop on Norfolk Street. According to the Appeals Court’s summary of the case, officers saw a car with “extremely” tinted windows, queried the license plate, and found that the car’s inspection sticker had expired and that its registration was “cancelled.”

When they pulled the car over, officers say they learned that Rivera, the driver, only had a learner’s permit and did not have a licensed adult in the car with him — a violation of state law. One of the officers ordered Rivera out of the car and pat frisked him. As he got to Rivera’s groin, the officer “felt a foreign object that he did not believe to be part of the defendant’s body and that was larger than a golf ball and hard,” the Appeals Court noted. 

The officer suspected the object was drugs, but Rivera allegedly maintained it was only his genitals.

According to the Appeals Court opinion, a “steady stream of traffic” passed by while police frisked Rivera’s groin area. The search continued in broad daylight as police reportedly handcuffed Rivera and positioned him against the side of a police cruiser, facing the sidewalk. 

“The officer proceeded to pull aside the waistbands of the defendant’s two pairs of pants and one pair of underwear and inspected the defendant’s genitals,” the Appeals Court noted. 

Eventually, the officer placed his hand inside Rivera’s underwear and retrieved a plastic bag that allegedly contained narcotics. Body-worn camera footage “shows that while the defendant was largely obscured from the view of oncoming traffic by the cruiser, the front of his body was fully visible to passersby on the sidewalk as well as anyone looking out a window from the nearby residential buildings and a family daycare,” the Appeals Court wrote in its decision. 

Rivera had previously filed a pre-trial motion in Suffolk Superior Court seeking to suppress some of the evidence in his case, including the narcotics police allegedly obtained during the search. However, a lower court judge found that the strip search “was reasonable in scope and manner.” 

With Monday’s opinion, the Appeals Court vacated much of the lower court’s previous order and handed the matter back to the Superior Court for further proceedings. Pointing to Massachusetts legal precedent, the Appeals Court asserted that a strip search is unreasonable if conducted in public “absent exigent circumstances.” 

While the justices said police had the right to search Rivera pursuant to his arrest for the traffic stop, they deemed the officer’s public strip search unjustified.

Rivera’s next court date for the 2021 drug charges is Sept. 9. He is also facing separate firearm and drug charges in pending cases out of Suffolk Superior Court and Boston Municipal Court’s Roxbury Division, online court records show.