Student strip search ruled unconstitutional

In a surprising victory for student’s rights, the United States Supreme Court today issued an opinion ruling that the strip search of a 13-year-old middle school student Savana Redding was unconstitutional. You can view our previous posts on this case by clicking here and here. This is a very good ruling for student’s rights and upholds the principle that their rights do not end at the schoolhouse door. It further provides clarity to school district in just how far they can reasonably go in an effort to make their free of drugs.

The opinion was authored by retiring Justice David Souter, perhaps one of his last opinions as a Justice. You can find a complete copy of the opinion by clicking here.

The Court ruled 8-1 in favor of the student, finding that the mere suspicion of finding a small quantity of ibuprofen was unreasonable and did not justify the search in her underwear. In so finding, the court determined that the content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion to the student. As the Court ruled: “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. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.”

The Court went on to describe the embarrassment and humiliation suffered by the student because of the search.

Savana’s subjective expectation of privacy against such a search is inherent in her account of it as embarrassing, frightening, and humiliating. The reasonableness of her expectation (required by the Fourth Amendment standard) is indicated by the consistent experiences of other young people similarly searched, whose adolescent vulnerability intensifies the patent intrusiveness of the exposure.

The Court made it clear that searches of this nature require “the support of reasonable suspicion of danger or of resort to underwear for hiding evidence of wrongdoing before a search can reasonably make the quantum leap from outer clothes and backpacks to exposure of intimate parts. The meaning of such a search, and the degradation its subject may reasonably feel, place a search that intrusive in a category of its own demanding its own specific suspicions.”

Only Justice Clarence Thomas voted with the school in the case. Justice Thomas continued his consistent opposition to such individual rights, particularly when invoked by students. In one line, he wrote “[p]reservation of order, discipline and safety in public schools is simply not the domain of the Constitution. And, common sense is not a judicial monopoly or a constitutional imperative.”