SAN FRANCISCO, July 20 (UPI) -- Two women have filed a federal lawsuit against a California county for allegedly strip-searching them and leaving them nude in their cells.
The proposed class-action suit against Marin County, the fourth such suit filed recently in a northern California county, says the county's strip-search policies violate privacy guarantees in state law and the U.S. Constitution, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday.
Marin County Sheriff Bob Doyle denied the allegations and said the county's strip-search policy complies with state law.
One of the plaintiffs said she was arrested in November on suspicion of drunken driving and taken to the jail at San Rafael where she was stripped by three male officers and searched, then put in a cell without clothes for six hours.
Her co-plaintiff said she was arrested last summer on a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace and taken to jail, where she was forcibly strip-searched and left nude in a cell for an hour.
The searches "were performed without regard to the nature of the alleged offense" and without any reason to believe either woman possessed weapons or contraband, the lawsuit said.
