Law360 (June 24, 2026, 3:54 PM EDT) -- The Fourth Circuit ruled Wednesday that Virginia prison officials can be granted qualified immunity from a federal lawsuit alleging they subjected an incarcerated person to an unconstitutional number of strip searches.

The three-judge panel held that despite Marcus C. Ingram being subjected to 26 strip searches in a month, prison officials including Israel Hamilton, warden of the Keen Mountain Correctional Center, could argue that a spate of drug overdoses in the facility made the searches reasonable.

"We assume without deciding that some of the strip searches to which appellant was subjected lacked reasonable justification and thus ran afoul of the Fourth Amendment," U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanie Thacker said in the opinion. "But because the reasonableness of those searches was not beyond debate at the time they took place, we affirm the district court's award of qualified immunity."

Keen Mountain suffered a wave of "near fatal" drug overdoses involving incarcerated people in the facility in May and June 2023, according to the opinion. The prison responded by implementing a new policy of strip-searching incarcerated people who visited the facility's "no contact video visitation room" before and after each visit, the opinion said.

The visitation room is a facility that allows one person at a time to place video calls to people outside the facility, without coming into physical contact. The prison ordered the strip searches after visitations in the room, based on anonymous informants who claimed drugs were being left for other incarcerated people to later retrieve, the opinion said.

The new policy resulted in an uptick of strip searches, with Ingram claiming that he was strip-searched over two dozen times in one month after visiting the room to call his wife. Ingram filed a federal lawsuit against Hamilton and a correctional officer at the facility, arguing that the searches violated his Fourth and Eighth amendment rights, the opinion said.

The prison officials moved for summary judgment, arguing that they are not liable for claims in the lawsuit under qualified immunity. A federal district court granted the motion, finding that because there was an ongoing drug crisis in the facility, the searches were justified, the opinion said.

The Fourth Circuit said to defeat a qualified immunity defense, the lawsuit would need to demonstrate that the policy violated a "clearly established right." The panel said typically this is done by pointing to a previous case with similar facts where an official was found to have violated the constitution.

The panel found that under Fourth Circuit precedent it is required to test the constitutionality of the search based on U.S. Supreme Court precedent in the 1979 case Bell v. Wolfish. The panel found that under Bell, the number of searches weighed in Ingram's favor, but the panel was also sympathetic to the underlying drug overdoses that caused the policy to be put into place.

The panel noted that in just one month preceding the policy's implementation, 13 incarcerated people had suffered near-fatal overdoses as a result of narcotics circulating in the facility. The panel also noted, however, that prison officials could not actually connect the overdoses to any incarcerated person who had been inside the visitation room.

The opinion said that because prison officials could not justify their belief that the drugs were coming from the visitation room, the search policy was unconstitutional, but it said the prison officials are still covered under qualified immunity.

The panel found that despite Ingram's citation of cases, none of the cited cases "foreclose the policy at issue in the case" and cannot be used, the opinion said.

Seth Carroll, an attorney representing Ingram, told Law360 in a telephone interview that he was "disappointed" that the panel did not find that any of the cases cited in the appeal applied. Carroll said he wished the court had taken more time to provide guidance for future cases about what constitutes a breach of qualified immunity.

"The decision I think is revealing of sort of the problems with the qualified immunity application, particularly in cases like this," Carroll said. "Because there is no split-second decision-making. This is an instituted jail policy that went on for months."

A spokesperson for the Virginia Attorney General's Office did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. Circuit Judges Stephanie Thacker, James Andrew Wynn and Robert Bruce King sat on the panel for the Fourth Circuit.

The government is represented by Caitlyn Breann Switzer, Jason S. Miyares, Theophani K. Stamos and Richard C. Vorhis of the Virginia Attorney General's Office.

Ingram is represented by Seth Raven Carroll of Commonwealth Law Group PLLC.

The case is Ingram v. Warden Israel Hamilton et al., case number 25-6634, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

--Editing by Rich Mills.

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