In a ruling of interest to educators, parents and students across the country, the Supreme Court ruled, 8 to 1, on Thursday that the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona girl by school officials who were looking for prescription-strength drugs violated her constitutional rights.
The officials in Safford, Ariz., would have been justified in 2003 had they limited their search to the backpack and outer clothing of Savana Redding, who was in the eighth grade at the time, the court ruled. But in searching her undergarments, they went too far and violated her Fourth Amendment privacy rights, the justices said.
Had Savana been suspected of having illegal drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to herself and other students, the strip search, too, might have been justified, the majority said, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter.
“In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear,” the court said. “We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”
The dissent was written by Thomas.
The court also ruled that the vice-principal could not personally be held liable for his actions in this case. Dissenting from that decision were Ginsburg and Stevens. However, lower courts can still decide to hold the school district liable.
(Curtsy to Sailorman in comments.)
So the vice principal can’t be held personally liable, and there were no damages.
Hm.
What’s the disincentive to forcibly strip a 13 year old girl again?
—Myca
What’s the disincentive to forcibly strip a 13 year old girl again?
If the district can still be held liable, that might lead many school districts to enact policies banning strip searches of students by school district personnel to avoid being on the hook for large penalties and just to avoid lawsuits in general. Some school districts already do that.
I’m relieved at this decision. Incredibly relieved. But at least based on the NYT article, it sounds like it was a pretty limited decision – that if the tip had involved marijuana instead of ibuprofen, the court might well have decided differently. I’d be curious to hear other people’s take once they have time to read the decision.
Sure, maybe. Hell, even probably.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that they ruled it illegal, but it seems to me that part of, “if the district can still be held liable,” involves holding the district liable.
—Myca
In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity,
Hell, chingona, a kid could do more damage to themselves taking as much ibuprofen as they could than they could smoking as much weed as they could handle.
Oh, the risk of being fired and disgraced is pretty severe. Quite frankly, the school district is the proper target here; the principal was acting as a representative of the district, and they should bear the brunt of the fallout. The principal should simply be fired for cause.
I do wonder how much Justice Ginsburg influenced the outcome here. And I do suspect this would be at least 5-4 the wrong way if the court had no women whatsoever on it. Of course, that’s horribly sexist of me, thinking that having one or (gasp!) even two women on the court might be better than having an endless parade of guys.
Jeff,
Hard to say what the outcome would have been without Ginsburg, but others have noted that all the justices except Thomas and Souter (who has no children) have daughters.
It seems in the commentary when the case was before the court, a lot of conservatives had a big problem with the school’s actions there. Their objections might have been based less on students having rights in school and more on schools acting in place of parents and general protective feeling toward girls/young women, but this case seemed to get to people on a variety of places along the political spectrum.
I don’t know … now that the decision is made, I feel like maybe this should have been expected. My previous fear was based on the history of decisions that gave the schools really broad reach in controlling students and general anti-drug/zero tolerance hysteria. But there is a difference between telling a kid they can’t hold a sign at a school-related event or saying a school can preview an edition of the student newspaper and strip-searching a 13-year-old.
Again, just going off the article, it seems like Thomas’ position is more based in principle – that the schools should have the right to do this and the courts shouldn’t second guess them – and the majority decision is based off the context – that maybe in some situations, this would be reasonable, but in this case, it clearly wasn’t.
Yeah, you folks are probably right, but it just rankles like hell to see this this happen and the perpetrators to get off the hook. Even if there are good, positive results later, it still pisses me off.
—Myca
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s clear that in the future, people like this vice principal who do similar strip-searches will be immune from being sued. The Court ruled to let this vice-principal off because the state of the law was unclear. In the future, after this decision, that same argument might not apply any longer.
Yep, Amp’s got it: the idea is that it’s wrong to hold government employees individually liable for actions that are not clearly unconstitutional (and given the circuit split on such searches, I can see the argument that this was not clearly unconstitutional, although Stevens and Ginsburg say it was). But once the Court has said this is definitely, absolutely unconstitutional, everyone has been fairly warned and is on the hook henceforth.
Sometimes in these cases, there is a sort of intermediate liability. think of these three outcomes where Accused does something to Victim:
1) Accused is not liable at all; his conduct was OK.
2) Accused’s conduct was not OK in retrospect and will not be permitted going forward. However, under the applicable statute liability would only result if Accused should have known at the time that the conduct was illegal . The court does not think that Accused should have known it was illegal. Therefore, the case bars similar acts in the future but does not assess Accused for liability.
3) Accused’s conduct was not OK and the accused should have known it at the time, therefore Accused is personally liable.
My guess is that this was a #2 situation. In other words, even though this accused was not personally liable, anyone ELSE who does it will be charged with a deliberate and knowing breach of the law, and will probably be held liable.
Amp, PG, and Sailorman: Yeah, that makes sense.
I do have a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept that someone would not have known that this was not okay, but as evidenced every time we discuss it, there are still people who want to claim that there was nothing wrong with it, so I guess it’s within the standard range of human thought.
—Myca
Myca, my guess is that the vice principal’s career’s future will be a direct function of the progress/success of any civil lawsuit brought by the parents. If there is none or it can be settled within the bounds of the school district’s insurance and without affecting the size of the premiums of that insurance down the line, then the vice principal will keep his/her job.
If you are trying to understand it, then instead of thinking about “the concept that someone would not have known that this was not okay”
try thinking about
“the concept that someone who was familiar with the applicable statutes and Supreme Court case law on illegal searches and seizures would have known that this would be defined by the USSC as a 4th amendment violation.” In other words, that it would not be illegal.
That’s what the liability stems from, not the “okay” part. Plenty of things which are obviously wrong from a moral standpoint and are therefore “not okay” are nonetheless permissible under the law.
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Certainly. I wasn’t speaking as a lawyer in my original comment, but it is equally true that I find it astonishing that a school official would ever assume that strip-searching a 13 year old over theoretical ibuprofin was legal.
—Myca
“I find it astonishing that a school official would ever assume that strip-searching a 13 year old over theoretical ibuprofin was legal.”
Why? Schools exercise enormous power over students and have hysterical zero-tolerance policies regarding drugs. If it’s legal for schools to punish students for nonsensical speech that merely refers to drugs when the kids aren’t even on school grounds, I could see how a school official would assume it was legal to strip-search a student to find drugs that other students claimed she was distributing inside the school.
Well, in part because of things like the the recent case of the school principal who confiscated a student’s cell-phone, ended up with naked pictures of another student, and was charged with child pornography.
Our culture tends to go absolutely apeshit when we’re faced with the prospect of people over 18 catching a glimpse of a picture of a nipple of someone under 18*, so strip searching a 13 year old girl with no record of disciplinary trouble because another girl said she gave her an Advil?
Yeah, I figured that that would be illegal.
As it turned out, I was right.
I also would have figured that school officials would be so terrified of accusations of sexual impropriety that they wouldn’t do something quite this creepily (and nonconsensually) pedophilic.
Unfortunately, I was wrong.
—Myca
* And though I actually really dislike this aspect of our culture, I am even less fond of the way we treat people under 18 as prisoners or animals much of the time. Bodily autonomy ought not to begin on your 18th birthday.
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The Supreme Court cases are the governing law of the land, and the Supremes have been so damn conservative lately that I am not surprised that a person would believe this not to be illegal. Frankly, I didn’t even think it was obvious that the court would rule in favor of the victim, and I don’t think I was alone in that. (I hoped that they would find for the victim, but I didn’t expect that they would find for the victim.)
That expectation, not the hope, is what drives liability. If the USSC had come down against the victim, then the conduct would have been deemed to be legal.
As an example, when you look at the pre-decision pundits, read carefully: Irrespective of which way they WANTED to have the court rule, what did they THINK the court would rule? If enough of them thought that the court would rule against the victim, then that explains why it’s a “#2” type verdict. I can’t bear to go back and look, but my recollection is that even here, some people expected the verdict to go against her.
(prosecution for showing nipplage, prosecution for child porn on cell phones, etc. are low-level state stuff, not precedent for this sort of thing. Media and speechifiers aside, only appellate and USSC rulings are what affect it)
So this is what interests me.
Why on earth does conservative generally = support for massive government abuse of power? I mean, a school is the government. The police are the government. The military are the government. Aren’t conservatives supposed to be the ones most suspicious of government action? Why are they the ones justifying it?
I boggle.
—Myca
It doesn’t always mean that.
Scalia just joined the majority in a decision holding that the confrontation clause requires the ability to cross examine government lab techs when criminal lab evidence is going to be presented. This is a huge benefit to defendants and a huge hit for the government.
Then again, he also just joined the majority in holding that there’s no right to DNA testing in many cases. That’s a huge benefit to the government and a huge hit to defendants.
Both of those decisions stemmed from his particular style of analysis, properly deemed “conservative,” but as you can see it doesn’t always mean that he comes down in favor of the government. Take the Comstock case: Scalia’s strict interpretation may well means that he rules against the continued commitment of sex offenders under the commerce clause power, even though that it a “liberal” outcome as compared to the reverse.
Certainly, not always. As you said, though, as the court grew more conservative, it became more rational to assume that they would rule in favor of the school district. What’s more, it seems to have a direct correlation … the more conservative the court is, the more likely I think analysts would be to predict a school district win, the more liberal the court is, the more likely to predict a win for the student. I don’t think that those assumptions are mistakes.
As you say, it’s certainly not 100% of the time, but it’s something I’ve noticed in our comment threads as well. If we have a thread about police brutality, and someone is in there defending the police’s actions as right and proper, it’s likely to be someone right-leaning. The same is true if we have a thread on CIA torture, or military misconduct, or things like corporal punishment in schools. Presidential power is a tricky one, since there’s the extra-added component of directly supporting or opposing the person you’re talking about, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that there was no widespread conservative outcry at Bush’s expansion of presidential power.
It’s not that there will always be someone defending the police, just that if there is, they’re likely to be on the right, and according to their rhetoric, that sounds counterintuitive to me.
—Myca
It’s an interesting debate. So let me ask a question for fun:
If government is exercising a power, AND IF the government’s exercise of power is the result of laws passed by democratically elected officials or appointees who were vetted through a democratically established process, AND if the means exist to change the exercise of power through the democratic process:
Is it a liberal or a conservative act to classify the exercise of power as “abusive” and to bar it, whether or not it is legal*?
Is it a liberal or conservative act to classify the exercise of power as “illegal*” and to bar it, whether or not it is abusive?
See, the line gets a bit wavery at times. In other threads, people have argued that there’s some sort of natural law which overrides the democratic-process laws that we have. (I’m thinking of health care, gay rights, and a few other things, but I’m trying to make a general example here.) That “override the laws” process, like any other type of process, can be liberal or conservative depending on its inputs. Imposing a general morality to say that we need to grant gay rights = liberal. Imposing a general morality to say that we don’t need to grant gay rights = conservative.
So can you look to how consistent someone is, and whether they tend to bend their rules when it suits them while insisting that their opponents follow the rules strictly? Problematically, as we all know, that’s a fairly prevalent trend on the left as well as on the right.
This makes matters more confusing: the tendency to accept a result honestly even if you hate it, or to promote a position as accurate even if you dislike it, is how I was raised to view “liberalism.” (think ACLU, criminal defense, and the like: hate the Nazis but protect their right to march; hate the rapists but protect their right to a defense.) But plenty of people who view themselves as “left wing” are fair weather friends when it comes to standards and consistency, and plenty of people who view themselves as right wing are willing to accept defeat if they can stick to their standards.
My view is probably a bit backwards: liberalism is usually more linked to “fairness” (the wholistic analysis of an individual’s place in the world and selectino of standards on that basis) rather than “justice” (the application of the same standards to everyone.)
*by “legal” in this particular post, I mean “consistent with the currently promulgated set of laws and court decisions put out by the government.”
Myca,
The search was conducted by two female school employees (an administrative assistant and the school nurse); it was just the vice-principal who authorized it. Indeed, the 9th Cir. held him liable while not holding the women who actually conducted the search liable because they were acting under his orders.
Girls generally — not just in U.S. culture, but also in many other countries — are expected to be anxious about their physical privacy around males but not around females. The most invasive search I’ve ever had was flying through a small airport in India where they didn’t have the technology to do proper body scans, so each female flier went into a curtained area to be thoroughly groped by a female airport employee. Yes, that’s an underwire bra, could you let go of my breasts now?
While it is of course possible for an adult woman to molest an adolescent girl, it’s not what usually comes to most people’s minds when they’re worried about pedophilia or even child porn. Cf. the freakout over the idea of a straight man taking Girl Scouts camping, or a gay man taking Boy Scouts camping, but the near-total lack of anxiety about any kind of woman supervising boys or girls.