State ACLU lawyers filed a lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of a Thornton woman who claims her rights were violated after a Colorado State Patrol trooper pulled her from her car last year while she was nursing her infant, and she was later strip-searched at the Jefferson County Jail.
Calling it the “worst day” of her life, Mercedes Archuleta, a 46-year-old mother of nine, was humiliated by the arrest and strip-search in June 2005, her attorneys said.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, names as defendants Lakewood police Detective Michelle Wagner; State Trooper Shayne Butler, who made the arrest; D.L. Mandelko, a jailer who booked Archuleta and ordered the strip-search; and Jefferson County Sheriff Ted Mink.
The lawsuit asks the sheriff to declare the jail’s strip-search policy unconstitutional and seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
“They treated her in a terrible manner,” said Timothy Macdonald, an attorney working with the ACLU on the case. “There was a string of missteps and bad behavior that led to bad things happening to Mercedes. ”
A spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office did not return phone calls, and officials with the attorney general’s office could not be reached for comment on behalf of the State Patrol.
Lakewood police spokesman Steve Davis said the city attorneys had not reviewed the case and would reserve comment.
Archuleta’s attorneys said the Lakewood detective mistakenly identified her as a suspect in a domestic-violence case based on a name and little else.
