Jordan Towney: Prison guard cut inmate’s clothes, strip searched in ‘extreme manner’

A judge has accepted a prison guard was “extreme” when he cut a young woman’s clothes off and performed an unnecessarily violating act.

A male prison guard held a vulnerable young woman down, cut off her clothes and performed a violating strip search in what a judge described as an “extreme” and “distressing” incident.

Corrective Services NSW then denied the woman her right to seek a lawyer, a court has heard.

Jordan Towney, 23, has succeeded in appealing her sentence for a raft of offences at Parramatta District Court, where details of the brazenly inappropriate strip search were aired.

Towney was born with an intellectual disability which meant she never learned to read or write, the court heard.

Jordan Towney was initially sentenced to 42 months prison. Picture: NSW Police

The court was told she’d had a “substantial involvement in the criminal justice system” as she struggled with homelessness and drug addiction.

On May 5 this year, she was sentenced to 42 months prison with a non-parole period of 16 months for a string of crimes including dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception, larceny, stealing a motor vehicle, police pursuit, shoplifting and assaulting an officer to inflict actual bodily harm.

During appeal proceedings on Monday, Towney’s Legal Aid lawyer argued her sentence was excessive and the assault of the officer was done in response to them “cutting all her clothes off her body” and “checking her cavities” in an inappropriate strip search.

“What’s so concerning about that is there’s clearly been a move by New South Wales Corrections to not require inmates to strip down — they’ve actually installed in a lot of corrective centres, machines that they can walk through,” her lawyer said.

The strip search was ‘extremely distressing’ for Towney. Picture: Facebook

“She was struggling to understand why she was in custody at the time. She was refused her right to go to court on that day. There were corrective [officers] who prevented her from having legal [representation] which they told the court was because of her behaviour.”

The court heard she was sent to hospital and later removed from eligibility for a rehabilitation program because of the assault in which she swung at the guard following the strip search.

Towney’s Legal Aid lawyer said she was so traumatised from the incident that she found it incredibly difficult to speak about it in their meetings.

But the crown prosecutor argued the sentence was adequate as “something had to be done” to prevent Towney’s “prolific offending”.

Judge Stephen Hanley SC said it was “concerning” she “was held down and her clothes were cut off”.

The judge said there were machines that could have searched her instead. Picture: Facebook

“There are machines which can do that without any intervention, which does not remove clothing or look into body cavities. And [it would have been] appropriate for that to take place with female officers.”

Judge Hanley accepted officers need to be protected, but said they must have been aware she was a vulnerable young woman with an intellectual disability.

“They also need to be aware that, irrespective of how she was conducting herself, there was a need for those officers to step back, and give it some consideration before they act in such an extreme manner — one that was extremely distressing to a young woman to be treated like,” he said.

Judge Hanley re-sentenced Towney to an aggregate sentence of three years in prison with a 15-month non-parole period.

She will be released to parole on December 16.