The Knucklehead of the Day award

Today's winner is US Marshall Patrick McDonald. He gets the award for the following.

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho - Security guards refused to allow a woman into a federal courthouse until she removed a bra that triggered a metal detector.

Lori Plato said she and her husband, Owen Plato, were stunned when U.S. Marshals Service employees asked her to remove her bra after the underwire supports set off the alarm.

"I asked if I could go into the bathroom because they didn't have a privacy screen and no women security officers were available," Plato said Wednesday. "They said, 'No.'

"I wasn't carrying a shank in my bra. If it's so dangerous, why did they give it back and let me put it on?"

Patrick McDonald, the U.S. Marshal in Boise, said appropriate security protocols were followed in the Sept. 20 matter, and guards suggested she simply remove the bra in her car outside, or find a restaurant bathroom.

"She's inflating it," McDonald said. "All of a sudden she just took it off. It wasn't anything we wanted to happen and it wasn't anything we asked for her to do. She did it so fast."

Plato, of Bonners Ferry, said she was parked on a busy street and wasn't familiar with downtown Coeur d'Alene businesses. So her husband held up his coat to shield her from the rest of the people in the courthouse lobby while she removed her bra underneath her shirt.

Generally, McDonald said, undergarments aren't considered a danger to security.

"I don't think they're considered a weapon, really, the last time I looked," he said.

He declined to discuss other ways the federal courthouse guards could have screened Plato for weapons.

A bra is a deadly weapon. Did anyone scan the US Marshalls in Coeur D'alene or Patrick McDonald to see if they had any brains in their head?(TFM is aware COEUR D'ALENE and Boise where McDonald works are several hundred miles apart) I guess these men and women needed some infantile jollies and McDonald seems to think its just another day at the office. If I was Plato, I'd call it sexual harassment. US Marshall Patrick McDonald is today's Knucklehead of the Day.

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