The Supreme Court sided with privacy rights with as evidenced by the recent ruling clarifying what common decency tells most of us.
Ya just can't strip search a 13-year-old.
Per the Ventura County Star:
In deciding a case involving the strip-search of a 13-year-old girl by school officials, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday came down on the side of common sense.
The justices, in an 8-1 ruling, said the search was not reasonable, thus violating the girl’s constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment.
This decision also makes clear for school officials where to draw the line between a student’s privacy rights and their zeal to keep their campuses free of drugs and weapons.
California and six other states recognized this boundary by previously passing laws prohibiting strip-searches in a school setting.
Not so in Arizona, where Savana Redding, now 19, was an honors student at a middle school in a small town near the border with New Mexico. A classmate had accused Savana of supplying her prescription ibuprofen, equivalent to two Advils.
The school’s vice principal then took Savana to his office where her backpack was searched. When nothing was found, she was taken to the nurse’s office and ordered to strip down to her underwear by two female employees. They then made her move her bra to the side and stretch her underwear waistband.
Again, nothing was found and, after what Savana described as “the most humiliating experience” in her life, no apology was offered by school officials.
Savana, who will be attending college in the fall, said of the ruling: “I’m pretty excited about it because that’s what I wanted. I wanted to keep it from happening to anybody else.”
Savana’s rights were violated solely on the false word of another eighth-grade student, with no other evidence or corroboration.
As Justice David Souter wrote in the majority opinion: “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.”
Wouldn’t it have been just as easy for school officials to have Savana remain under their watchful eye in the principal’s office, then contact her parents and wait until they arrived before any search was done?
All Americans — no matter the age — have a constitutional right not to be subjected to unreasonable searches. The court correctly ruled strip-searching Savana was a case of school officials stepping over the line.
6/27/2009
