A court has condemned the humiliating and unlawful strip search of a music festival attendee, awarding her $93,000 and flagging further damages.
Officers did not have reasonable grounds to search Raya Meredith at the 2018 Splendour in the Grass festival at Byron Bay, the NSW Supreme Court found today.
Loading
Meredith became the lead plaintiff in 2022 in a 3000-member class action in the Supreme Court challenging the lawfulness of police strip searches at music festivals.
In a surprise development earlier this year, the state of NSW radically changed course and admitted the strip search of Meredith was unlawful, but it denied allegations about strip searches involving other group members.
The landmark decision paves the way for the state to pay millions of dollars for unlawful strip searches.
In this case, Justice Dina Yehia awarded Meredith $93,000 in damages plus interest. This included $43,000 in compensatory damages for assault, battery and false imprisonment, and $50,000 in aggravated damages.
Yehia said Meredith was also entitled to exemplary damages, a form of punitive damages, but this figure has not yet been quantified.
The award of aggravated damages covered conduct during the strip search ($30,000) as well as during the court case ($20,000), including the initial claim by the state of NSW that the search was lawful. It had made assertions “wholly without basis”, Yehia said.
Read the full story here.
With AAP
Read the full article here
