Result: $641,546.94 federal jury verdict, including $100,000.00 in punitive damages due to the egregiousness of the officer’s conduct

Young woman in school to become a police officer is a passenger in a vehicle driven by her husband coming home from a St. Louis Cardinal’s playoff game when they encountered an unlawful St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department “checkpoint.” Despite having committed no crime (not even a traffic violation), the young woman and her husband are drug out of their vehicles by multiple metropolitan police officers at gunpoint. After getting drug out of their vehicle without legal justification, a metro police officer conducts a vaginal body cavity search of the young woman in a dirty semi-truck parking lot in full view of other male police officers, plants cocaine on the young woman, and then proceeds to delete the young woman’s sexual assault complaint from the police department’s computer system. At trial, the officer unbelievably testifies that she conducted the vaginal body cavity search in order to ensure that the young woman had not “hidden a knife or gun in her vagina.” Following a jury trial in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri…