Strip-searching teenage girls in school?
posted at 2:57 pm on March 24, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
The Supreme Court will get a chance to determine whether schools acting in loco parentis have the right to strip-search students in ways that could get parents a visit from Child Services. Tom Maguire highlights the case of School Officials Gone Wild, who demanded that a 13-year-old girl display her genitalia to a school nurse and a school secretary to ensure that she had no drugs on her. What were they hoping to find, besides a lawsuit? You’re not going to believe it:
Savana Redding still remembers the clothes she had on — black stretch pants with butterfly patches and a pink T-shirt — the day school officials here forced her to strip six years ago. She was 13 and in eighth grade.
An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.
The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”
Ms. Redding, an honors student, had no pills. But she had a furious mother and a lawyer, and now her case has reached the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on April 21.
The best part of the story? The school officials never bothered to ask her if she had pills on her before the strip search. They just took her aside and had the nurse and a clerk force her to strip.
Maybe Redding was a bad kid with a track record of disciplinary problems? Well, no, she wasn’t. In fact, before the strip search, she had no record of disciplinary problems at all. When her lawyers pointed this out in court documents, the district acknowledged the lack of a disciplinary record, but said that the inference should have been that she’d just been masterful at avoiding getting caught. They also defended themselves by claiming to have heard rumors that Redding had drunk alcohol at a party, but the court documents show that the person starting the rumor hadn’t attended the event.
Quite frankly, I’m not surprised that the school district has appealed their loss to the Supreme Court, because they appear consistently too stupid to know when to stop.
In this case, the ACLU (which is supporting Redding) has it right. The school acts in loco parentis, not in loco law enforcement. They had no probable cause to do a strip search of the student, and even more basically, have no right to force students into strip searches in the first place. They never tried contacting Redding’s mother or the police. The school was so horrified by the thought that this student, who had never caused them problems before, might have ibuprofen that they decided to act like storm troopers rather than a school.
The question won’t be whether Redding will win. It will be whether it goes 9-0 in her favor. I’d put that at even money.
Blowback
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Bust ‘em during an overt act and expel them, but otherwise, leave ‘em the fuck alone.
southsideironworks on March 24, 2009 at 5:43 PM
Here’s yet another school Zero Tolerance Policy, this time for…FLATULANCE…and the disturbance it caused…oh the horror…oh the smell!!
As Cheech and Chong once quipped about flatulence…”it’s not the smell man, it’s the burning of my eyes!!”
Liberty or Death on March 24, 2009 at 5:44 PM
Please tell me that all of those officials – nurse, clerk and all – have since been strip-searched and fired, in no particular order.
redfoxbluestate on March 24, 2009 at 5:45 PM
The NY Slimes names names:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/us/24savana.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
Kerry Wilson, the assistant principal, ordered the two school employees to search both students. The searches turned up no more pills…
…The search was conducted by Peggy Schwallier, the school nurse, and Helen Romero, a secretary.
Laura in Maryland on March 24, 2009 at 5:48 PM
If a student wants to deal drugs he can tuck them in his shorts for safety until the school summons a police officer to the location. I see the merits of using trained law enforcement officers to handle the search, but it probably creates a lot of leeway for kids who want to sell drugs. Some schools have police officers there all the time. I guess if a drug problem gets serious enough a school always has that option.
dedalus on March 24, 2009 at 5:54 PM
Note to ibuprofen smugglers: intentionally get caught with one baby aspirin before trying the big stuff.
I would like to see someone go to jail.
burt on March 24, 2009 at 5:55 PM
Prelude to socialism. If that would have happened to my children or grand children, I would be in jail right now.
Johan Klaus on March 24, 2009 at 5:56 PM
In that case they wouldn’t be customers they’d be serfs. You know sort of like taxpayers but with more freedom :-)
Oldnuke on March 24, 2009 at 6:00 PM
A search function on the school district’s website shows that all of the people named in the case, are still there in the same positions.
MikeA on March 24, 2009 at 6:02 PM
“…the district acknowledged the lack of a disciplinary record, but said that the inference should have been that she’d just been masterful at avoiding getting caught.”
Hmmmm….in other words, GUILTY until proven innocent. But I’m not surprised. The school systems have been run by fucking idiots for years. “Zero Tolerance” means not having to think about any particular set of circumstances or situation. “One size fits all”. Gee, just like the students!
GarandFan on March 24, 2009 at 6:14 PM
And you want to allow public high schools to use the word of high school students as reasonable suspicion to perform strip searches of female students?
It’s been a while since you were in HS, isn’t it? Had you been there recently, you would realize what a bad idea that is.
JohnGalt23 on March 24, 2009 at 6:30 PM
I believe they can be witnesses in trials for murder and that their testimony can be used to convict.
I’d probably discount much of what a high schooler says, but someone who is investigating high school drug use is probably going to talk to a lot of high schoolers.
dedalus on March 24, 2009 at 6:39 PM
Just thinking about “if this had been my daughter” has me seeing red. It would take every ounce of my being to not assault the assistant principal responsible. Just flipping unbelievable an “adult” thought strip-search was the right course of action. And the nurses are complicit for complying.
Sorax on March 24, 2009 at 6:52 PM
Sounds to me like Ms. Schwallier and Ms. Romero watched Chained Heat one too many times.
Putting a young girl through a humiliation she will never forget over an Advil? There is no greater unrelenting force than an outraged mother and school officials should remember that the next time they take the law into their own hands. We will find you. And we will never forget you.
CarolynM on March 24, 2009 at 6:53 PM
We are hostile to that difference of opinion because it is antithetical to the basis of us living as free citizens; it is an opinion driven solely by fear.
It is the same rationale that most gun control freaks use to argue that firearms should be prohibited. True, a few of them really don’t like the idea of free citizens having the right and means of self-defense, because they like the idea of an all-powerful, unchallenged central state. But most gun control advocates oppose them for no such nefarious reason; they simply don’t like them because they are afraid of them. And they are afraid of them, because they have been exposed to a constant drumbeat of propaganda telling them to be afraid of them.
The same can be said of most drug prohibitionists. They are afraid of a society where people are openly using drugs. They will break out such non-sequiturs as “We’ll have people killing others behind the wheel”, or “We’ll be a nation of zombies” to justify a position that, if they look at the evidence with a rational eye, they would know to be unjustifiable. They will do so, because they have been exposed to a constant drumbeat of fear-inducing propaganda, telling them that they must sacrifice their liberty to be safe from this evil menace.
And this is how liberty dies.
Large amounts of cash in your possession… must be a drug dealer, 5th Amendment notwithstanding. Seize the money, and let them prove they aren’t a dope peddler.
No-knock warrants? Necessary abrogation of liberty, to fight the War on Drugs. And if a few innocent people get killed because of mistakes… well, you do want to win the War on Drugs, don’t you?
There’s a rumor going around school that a 13 year-old girl might be stashing prescription Advil? Strip search her, including checking out the inside of her… well, inside of her. What’s that you say? A stomach-turning violation of not only what should be sacrosanct Constitutional rights, but of all standards of human decency? WHAT ARE YOU… A DOPE FIEND???
Why are we hostile towards you and your opinions? Because we are free citizens, and we refuse to allow ourselves to be governed through use of fear. Because we realize that once you open the doors to the halls of power to the fear-mongers, it is exceptionally hard to kick them out.
JohnGalt23 on March 24, 2009 at 6:54 PM
Ya just never know. You got Kennedy in there,, he could go either way,, could be a big opportunity for libs to truly turn our schools into the real socialist utopias they have dreamed of!
JellyToast on March 24, 2009 at 7:02 PM
Except we’re not talking about using them as eyewitnesses in the criminal justice system. If we were, we would be talking about getting appropriate warrants. We would be talking about a young girl who would be given all types of protections, including not being interrogated without her parents and her attorney present. We would be talking about witnesses who if they lied, would be subject to felony charges.
No, we’re talking about strip searching a young girl on the word of her peers, with at least a 50-50 chance of that word coming from young boys, many of whom would think it was just hysterical to subject her to that level of humiliation. Maybe they have an axe to grind with her… maybe she spurned their advances. And when the authorities don’t find anything… well, everyone just has a good old laugh about it. Everyone of course, except the young girl, who just experienced a humiliation that she will be lucky if it only takes years for her to get over.
It may sound reasonable to you… to me, it sounds like advice from the galactically stupid.
JohnGalt23 on March 24, 2009 at 7:04 PM
how does the fact that she was an honors student change anything?
rob verdi on March 24, 2009 at 7:17 PM
She wouldn’t be given all those protections if a police officer had reasonable suspicion that she was in the process of selling drugs. Based on the officer’s experience, the possession of drugs and the identification made by the apprehended girl the officer would be able to search her bags and person.
The fact that it was a strip search and done by school officials rather than police complicates the issue, but in a public space there seems to be enough to trigger the reasonable suspicion threshold for a police officer. The most relevant SCOTUS case in this area is Terry v. Ohio.
dedalus on March 24, 2009 at 7:41 PM
Any prosecutor that tried to use Terry to cover this would be immediately laughed out of court.
If I remember my con law properly, didn’t Terry say something about “articulable facts”? What are the articulable facts here… that someone said she might be stashing dope? Sounds like something approximating an officer’s hunch to me, which SCOTUS specifically ruled out in Terry.
Also, didn’t Terry rule on a stop-and-frisk by an officer? If you are going to try to tell me, with a straight face, that a vaginal exam qualifies as a “stop-and-frisk”, then let’s stop wasting everyone’s time, and punt the idea of “unreasonable searches” altogether.
JohnGalt23 on March 24, 2009 at 8:05 PM
I think it was a strip search not a cavity search based on what I read.
A hunch might be “hey that girl is wearing a Phish concert shirt, let’s frisk her”. Do you believe that a police officer who finds crack vials on one person can’t frisk a second person who is fingered by the first? Are judges likely to throw that evidence out of court because it was just a hunch? Maybe, but I’d guess that a lot of teenagers got busted and convicted that way.
dedalus on March 24, 2009 at 8:15 PM
The war on drugs is a joke. A bad joke. My sister told me today that my 6 year old nephew can’t take cough drops to school…Even at six, I would have been smuggling a few Ricolas, it’s just my nature..The more they tell the kids “no” the more they will do it…The laws and the consequences against drugs have been more harmful than any of the illegal drugs for a long time…..
As I always say, “Too much Government”………..
adamsmith on March 24, 2009 at 8:45 PM
Stop-and-frisk. Weapons search. Non-invasive. These are key parts of Terry.
In fact, a case far closer to point is Minnesota v. Dickerson
In that case, cocaine seized was thrown out because LEO’s didn’t follow the strictures set down in Terry. To wit:
No strip search. No body cavity search. The LEO’s just went into a pocket, without a warrant, and cocaine was tossed out of evidence.
Terry was about immediate safety of LEO’s and citizens, granting the police the authority to engage in a topical search for deadly weapons. To try to pass it off as a free-for-all to examine 13 year-old
vaginaslabia is, IMHO, unconscionable.JohnGalt23 on March 24, 2009 at 8:59 PM
In a world where students are being prosecuted for sending nude pictures of themselves over a cell phone to their friends. how is it ok for the school to do this s#it Im a father of two children.I simply cant imagine what i would do to these people if that were my daughter.I would take a real hands on approach I can tell you that much.what those people did in my opion was a felony and they should do jail time and lots of it.
lees on March 24, 2009 at 9:23 PM
You are right that Minnesota v. Dickerson is more relevant. Though New Jersey v. T. L. O. is very likely the case the Court will look at most closely if they hear this one.
The question with Terry is “probable cause” vs “reasonable suspicion”. In TLO the Court held that there was the lower “reasonable suspicion” standard for school officials when dealing with students. And that schools had a lower threshold than for LEO’s in their dealings with the public.
In this case the school may be hampered by the “plain view” consideration and the quality of the evidence that formed the suspicion. Also, in TLO the search was of a bag rather than the more invasive strip search.
dedalus on March 24, 2009 at 9:29 PM
If the Americans had been willing truly to fight a war on drugs in one of the countries of origin, it seems they would not now suffer these degradations at home. Nor does it seem it would have been necessary to fight such wars in all of the drug-producing countries, for the public dismemberment of one often suffices as an example for others. But for many decades, it seems the Americans have bought too little destruction with their defense dollars.
Kralizec on March 24, 2009 at 9:40 PM
And if it were my daugter and two male school employees, there would be two dead male school employees.
Grafted on March 24, 2009 at 10:12 PM
All this over IBUPROFEN? You have got to be kidding me. I went to Lutheran parochial school when I was growing up. Our son is going to a Lutheran parochial school. While the discipline is tight,he has more freedom at his school than kids going to public school. For example, he will NOT be expelled for drawing a picture of a gun, doing a report on the armed forces, or taking a plastic sword to school for a halloween costume.
What a world we live in. No wonder we are headed toward fascism, the compliance is being ingrained at a young age in the public school systems.
AZfederalist on March 24, 2009 at 11:39 PM
Public schools love zero-tolerance policies which are in reality zero-brain policies. Only the dummy liberals in charge of the public schools could come up with such a fantastically stupid idea. Zero-tolerance policies allow school officials to operate in “brainless” mode, no need to apply any common sense or thought to a given matter. No need to consider any circumstances, just apply the knee-jerk reactionary rule in every case.
We need to shut the public schools down tight. Sell off the buildings to the highest bidders and privatize the entire system. Parents need to be treated like the customer that they are and not like people that are trying to interfere with the self-righteous know it all school system.
Of course this means no more teachers union and no more National Education Association. Good riddance to all of those self absorbed leaches that don’t give a wit about teaching sound knowledge to our children.
Maxx on March 25, 2009 at 10:11 AM
JohnGalt23 on March 24, 2009 at 6:54 PM
Your over the top pontification does not in fact mean you ARE John Galt. Just an observation.
Think what you want. Personally, I think equating Freedom and Liberty to smoking dope id ridiculous.
catmman on March 25, 2009 at 10:26 AM
Well, comrade, there is no evidence of any wrong-doing, therefore we need to have a full scale investigation.
Are they presuming the GUILT of EVERY student without a record? Are they strip-searching EVERY student in the district? If not, why not? When people in authority are allowed to continue the practice of this form of socialism the United States of America as a free nation, is dead and gone. The a@@holes in this school district appear not to know that the foundational documents presume innocence, NOT guilt. And the people who perpetrated the crime should be prosecuted for child sex crimes. One last thought; where the perps LESBIANS?
oldleprechaun on March 25, 2009 at 10:33 AM
JohnGalt23 on March 25, 2009 at 10:55 AM
Smoking dope does not equal freedom and does not equal Liberty.
JohnGalt23 on March 25, 2009 at 10:55 AM
Then stop using the reference to it.
catmman on March 25, 2009 at 11:20 AM
JohnGalt23 on March 25, 2009 at 10:55 AM
I fear no man either.
Spiders, though, creep me out.
And zombies.
catmman on March 25, 2009 at 11:22 AM
It’s sexual assault, period. And, sexual assault of a minor. Put the nurse(s) and anyone else in the room when the search was conducted on the perv list for the rest of their lives and make them stay away 1,000 feet from all children. Shoot, take their kids away from them too.
Before all of that happens, conduct an extensive cavity search on them, because they might be masterful at hiding contraband.
doufree on March 25, 2009 at 11:44 AM
Seriously … had that been my daughter, I would have have beaten the hell out of everyone involved. Hell, I might have shot someone.
wytammic on March 25, 2009 at 11:58 AM
Call the parents in and talk about it.
Ridiculous.
Dr. ZhivBlago on March 25, 2009 at 5:20 PM
By their twisted logic bottled water warrants the lash and lipstick the stockade!!
Legal compounds are LEGAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They should be taken anywhere at anytime.
Advil = strip search, Twinkies = banned from the vending machines, Carbon Dioxide = global warming nonsense so don’t exhale (unless you are a liberal), condoms = here have a twelve pack. The problem with education is the lack of education most educators possess.
This should be a 9-0 slam dunk ruling in favor of the girl with those involved in the search branded as sex offenders and sent to prison. However, with this lot of “judges” I’m guessing 5-4……either way, depending on the prevailing legal statutes in 18th century Sweden and the latest Romanian polling data….but not the Constitution of the United States!
AMEN!
Bubba Redneck on March 26, 2009 at 1:18 AM
And people wonder why private school enrollment and home schooling is up and public school enrollment is down……….
People value education for their children, not indoctrination. It will be a cold day in Obama’s office before my son goes to public school.
Bubba Redneck on March 26, 2009 at 1:22 AM
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