A woman says a sheriff's deputy in Texas stripped her naked in a
gas station parking lot and administered a cavity search of her genitals
because of suspicions she was in possession of marijuana.
"It was
embarrassing, degrading," Charnesia Corley told CNN's Don Lemon on
Thursday. "I felt low, I felt helpless."
The incident
happened during a traffic stop in June in Harris County. A male sheriff's
deputy pulled Corley over and then searched her car after saying he smelled
marijuana in it, she said.
After finding
nothing, she said, he called a female officer out to search Corley.
"They took
me around to the side of my car, and she tells me, 'Pull your pants
down,'" Corley told CNN.
Corley, who was handcuffed, said she told the female deputy that
she didn't have any underwear on.
The female
deputy replied that it didn't matter, pulled Corley's pants down and then told
her to bend over, Corley told CNN.
"I bent
over and she proceeded to stick her fingers in me, and I popped up immediately
and I told her, 'No! What are you doing? You can't do that to me,' she said.
'"I felt like they raped me'
The deputy told her that she could do
what she wanted because it was a narcotics search, according to Corley.
After Corley
resisted, another female deputy was apparently called to complete the search.
"I felt
like they raped me," Corley told CNN.
Her attorney,
Samuel Cammack III, said that what the deputies did in the middle of a parking
lot was unconstitutional.
"It wasn't
a strip search, it was a manual cavity search," he told CNN.
The Harris
County Sheriff's Office said in a statement that it was unable to comment on
the matter "until the completion of an ongoing internal affairs
investigation, and pending the status of civil litigation."
"We anticipate that the office of Inspector General will
share their findings with Sheriff Ron Hickman in accordance with state law and
civil service procedures in the near future," the statement said.
But Harris
County Sheriff's spokesperson Thomas Gilleland told CNN affiliate KTRK last weekthat
the deputies did everything as they should.
Gilleland said
one deputy wrote in the report that Corley said they could "strip search
her if I needed to."
Corley denied
that she had given them her consent.
Corley believes it was discrimination
Cammack said the district attorney's
office has dropped charges against his client. According to KRTK, Corley had
been charged with two misdemeanors: resisting arrest and possession of
marijuana.
CNN wasn't
immediately able to reach the district attorney's office for comment early
Friday.
Corley, who is
African-American, told CNN that she believed the deputies discriminated against
her.
She said the
male deputy was white, the first female deputy who arrived on the scene was
African-American and the second was white.
Cammack said he
wasn't sure he'd go as far as to call what happened discriminatory.
"It's more
about police conduct, I think, than it is race," he told CNN.
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