Assistant Principal Saved from Liability

June 26, 2009
Supreme Court Says Child’s Rights Violated by Strip Search By ADAM LIPTAK, New York Times

WASHINGTON — A strip search of a 13-year-old girl by officials at her middle school violated the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in an 8-to-1 decision.

The student, Savana Redding, had been suspected of bringing prescription-strength ibuprofen to the school, in Safford, Ariz.

Justice David H. Souter, writing for the majority, said a search of Ms. Redding’s backpack and outer garments did not offend the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. But the pills in question, each no stronger than two Advils, did not justify an “embarrassing, frightening and humiliating search,” Justice Souter wrote.

School officials ordered Ms. Redding, whom another girl had accused of giving her drugs, to strip to her bra and underpants and to pull them away from her body, exposing her breasts and pelvic area. No drugs were found.

The case attracted national attention and gave rise to an intense debate over how much leeway school officials should have in enforcing zero-tolerance policies for drugs and violence. Some parents were outraged by the intrusiveness of the search, while others worried about tying the hands of school officials charged with keeping their children safe.

The case also revealed a gender fault line at the court. In an unusual interview about a pending case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told USA Today in the spring that judging from their comments at the argument, her colleagues, all men, had failed to appreciate what Ms. Redding had endured.

“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” Justice Ginsburg said. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I don’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”

In the end, Justice Ginsburg’s view of the constitutionality of the search prevailed.

But the decision did not offer particularly clear guidance to school personnel, who were told only to take account of the extent of danger of the contraband in question and whether there is good reason to think it is hidden in an intimate place. So the upshot of the decision in a practical sense may well be to eliminate strip searches in schools.

“A number of communities have decided that strip searches in schools are never reasonable and have banned them no matter what the facts may be,” Justice Souter said, citing a regulation of the New York City Department of Education banning such searches in all circumstances.

The court stopped short, however, of allowing Ms. Redding’s lawsuit to go forward against the assistant principal who ordered the search and the two female school officials who conducted it. The state of the law at the time of the search, in 2003, was too murky to allow the officials to be sued, Justice Souter said.

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