"A Teen Sexting Case Revealed How Judges Let Police Invade Children’s Privacy"

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Whether the police have the right to force your teenage son to masturbate in front of them in order to incriminate himself is a legal question few parents would think they’d have to consider.

And yet Trey Sims’ legal guardians had to do exactly that. In an effort to prosecute the 17-year-old for sexting his 15-year-old girlfriend, Manassas police detective David Abbott obtained a search warrant authorizing him to take “photographs of [Sims’] genitals,” including “a photograph of the suspect’s erect penis.” According to court documents, in the process of executing the search warrant, Abbott took the teenager to a juvenile detention center, took him to a locker room and, with two uniformed, armed officers looking on, ordered Sims to pull down his pants.

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After taking pictures with his cell phone of the teenager’s genitals, Abbot then ordered the minor to masturbate so that he could take a picture of his erection. Sims tried but failed to comply with the officer’s orders; Abbott later threatened Sims’ lawyer that, if police couldn’t get a picture of the teenager’s erection by forcing the kid to masturbate, he would obtain a photo of the teenager’s engorged genitals by subjecting him to “an erection-producing injection” at a hospital.

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It wasn’t until this month — more than three years after Sims was taken to that locker room — that a federal appeals court issued a decision in his favor: By a divided 2-1 vote, the court held that a reasonable police officer should have known it was unlawful to order a teenage boy to masturbate in front of him and other officers.

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