He and a female administrative assistant searched Savana’s backpack but found nothing. Wilson then sent Savana to the school nurse’s office to have her clothes searched for pills. After the assistant and a nurse had Savana remove her outer clothing, they told her to pull her bra out and shake it, and to pull out the elastic on her underpants, thus exposing her breasts and pelvic area. Still no pills were found.

Savana’s mother filed suit against the school. On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled (8-to-1) that the strip search violated the Constitution (1).

Justice David H. Souter, writing for the majority, said a search of the girl's backpack and outer garments did not offend the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. But the pills, each no stronger than two Advils, did not justify an "embarrassing, frightening and humiliating search."

Under the reasonable suspicion standard of T.L.O (2)., a school search "will be permissible... when the measures adopted are reasonably related to the objectives of the search and not excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction. That means no finger poking in little girl's orifices for fairly benign headache tablets.

This ruling will still allow strip searches for dangerous contraband; for example, suppose little Johnny is walking around with what looks like a rifle barrel sticking out his butt under his pants. In this instance, there is good reason to think that the rest of the rifle may be hidden in an intimate place. However, truly dangerous contraband can be found with metal detectors and do not require a strip search.

Dissenting Justice Clarence Thomas would have ruled the search constitutional regardless of circumstances believing that otherwise this ruling may well eliminate strip searches in schools altogether and thereby provide the nation's students a court-sanctioned hiding place: "Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments," he wrote. "Nor will she be the last after today's decision, which announced the safest places to secrete contraband in school."

I am not a pussy in regard to crime fighting. There's no denying there are schools in America that are very dangerous; I would rather be a Jew selling pork chops in Baghdad than be a teacher in a Detroit High School. Certainly school officials may need to take extreme measures in order to maintain discipline and safety in certain public schools; however I believe that strip searches for children are degrading and should be banned, as they are in the New York public school sysytem.

If we follow Justice Thomas' logic that because the school officials searched in a location where the pills could have been hidden, the search was reasonable in scope under T. L. O., then officials could also have rooted around in her anal and vaginal cavities where the pills could also have easily been hidden. But is it reasonable to assume that students routinely shove Advils up their asses to be retrieved later in case they get a headache?

Although drug dealers may routinely hide drugs in their anal cavities (3), schools should not be treating children with less rights than police treat adult criminals where the cops need a search warrant to look into body cavities. That is, we protect criminals from unreasonable searches when the items are illegal or dangerous yet some schools see no problem with warrantless poking into naughty areas for items that are not only legal, but trivially harmless and only break some petty administrative rule. For example, gum chewing is prohibited in most schools; should school officials be allowed to spread your daughter's cheeks to look for a pack of gum?

Nothing is More Idiotic than a Zero Tolerance Policy

I realize that some pills may be dangerous and I understand why some schools have zero-tolerance policy since they are not pharmacists and cannot readily ascertain exactly what kind of drugs they are dealing with. However, when school officials know exactly as in this case that the pills are Ibuprofins, then they shouldn't have searched as if for illegal narcotics.

Some of my readers may feel that we are hamstringing school officials from maintaining order by denying them the ability to make any kind of searches; however the same argument may be made regarding the police: obviously we could apprehend many more criminals if the police were allowed to make warrantless and unreasonable searches. But our Founding Fathers wisely favored a citizen's legitimate expectation of privacy against a thoroughly intrusive government. They chose Freedom over Safety. In our schools we must likewise balance the needs of schools to provide a safe place for education but at the same time respect the privacy of young children.

I have no problem empowering schoolteachers and administrators almost complete discretion to establish and enforce the rules they believe are necessary to maintain control over their classrooms. However, this doctrine of in loco parentis where the authority of a parent is transferred to teachers does not confer upon them the ability to treat children in a manner no sane parent would treat their child. That is to say, if I suspected my child of harboring drugs, I would check their clothing but I would never, ever subject them to a strip search and so teachers or school officials should not do what I do not allow myself to do.

Cavity searches of a career criminal are no more embarrassing to him than walking around in a wrinkled shirt. Cavity searches of young children are extremely humiliating, degrading, and life-altering. We should be very, very careful.

Of course, drug use among children would not be a problem if we simply legalized drugs. When drugs are legal, no one is pushing them on kids. If we made sneakers illegal then dealers would be hanging around schools whispering, "Hey kid, try on these Air Jordans."

Sources

Media Awareness Project: US: Supreme Court Says Child's Rights Violated By Strip Search

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ENDNOTES

(1):

ACLU, SAFFORD UNIFIED SCHOOL DIST. v. REDDING [PDF]

Because the suspected facts pointing to Savana did not indicate that the drugs presented a danger to students or were concealed in her underwear, Wilson did not have sufficient suspicion to warrant extending the search to the point of making Savana pull out her underwear.

...

Here, the content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion. Because Wilson knew that the pills were common pain relievers, he must have known of their nature and limited threat and had no reason to suspect that large amounts were being passed around or that individual students had great quantities. Nor could he have suspected that Savana was hiding common painkillers in her underwear. When suspected facts must support the categorically extreme intrusiveness of a search down to an adolescent’s body, petitioners’ general belief that students hide contraband in their clothing falls short; a reasonable search that extensive calls for suspicion that it will succeed. Nondangerous school contraband does not conjure up the specter of stashes in intimate places, and there is no evidence of such behavior at the school;...

(2):

Wiki, New Jersey v. T. L. O., 469 U. S. 325

New Jersey v. T. L. O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985) was a case appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1984, involving the search of a high school student for contraband after she was caught smoking. She was charged as a juvenile for the drugs and paraphernalia found in the search. She fought the search, claiming it violated her Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, held that the search was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

...

The Court reaffirmed that there is a balancing between the individual's—even a child's—legitimate expectation of privacy and the school's interest in maintaining order and discipline. Accordingly, school officials do not need a warrant to search the belongings of students, but they do require a "reasonable suspicion".

This reasonable suspicion test, meaning the reasonableness of the search under all the circumstances, is a lesser standard than the probable cause standard. Such reasonableness is based on two criteria: 1, whether the action was justified at its inception; 2, whether the search as actually conducted was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place.

(3):

Pocono Record News, Drug felon found 'sitting on the evidence' after Pocono traffic stop

A traffic stop on Route 940 in Pocono Lake led Pocono Mountain Regional Police to request a search warrant for passenger Ulyessie Huggins, 26, of Brooklyn, N.Y.

They found — stuck in his anal cavity — bags of cocaine valued at $2,400 destined for customers in the parking lot of Wal-Mart in Mount Pocono, according to police.