RSS
Home
Supreme Court to weigh in on teen strip search case
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
When I was in high school, they used to periodically put the school in lock down -- we had to stay in our seats with our bags tucked under our feet, and were not allowed to get up, even to walk around the classroom -- and the police department would bring drug-sniffing dogs through each class and have the dogs sniff each student and each bag. If they alerted on any particular person, that student was taken away for further searches -- I don't know what that consisted of, but I'm sure strip searching and drug testing were part of the deal. (They also used to search lockers and the cars in the student parking lot.)
When I told my husband, who went to Smokey Hill High School, about this, he was shocked. Now, that wasn't unusual in the early days of our Country Mouse/City Mouse dynamic, but still. He couldn't believe it was legal for the police to search people for proof of a crime without a warrant or even probable cause. I, on the other hand, am no kind of Constitutional scholar, but my understanding is that none of the Constitutional protections enjoyed by adult citizens apply to those that are underage.
All of that is why I'm finding this story interesting: The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case of a then-thirteen-year-old girl who was strip searched at school because she had been accused by a former friend of having prescription ibuprofen. It seems to me that case law is against her, as the last case to address this issue (in 1985) ruled that schools could search a student's purse without probable cause as long as their suspicions were 'reasonable.' That said, it's not clear to me if the defining issue is the difference between searching a purse and searching a thirteen-year-old's breasts and genitals; or if the case hinges on what constitutes a reasonable suspicion.
If it's the later, I think the school is in for a hard time of it. Savana Redding was an honor student with a squeaky-clean disciplinary record; the school district is defending itself by saying that hallway gossip accused her of drinking alcohol on this one occasion, and that a clean record just means she'd never been caught. Which is . . . not a compelling argument, to say the least. As for the strip searching issue, Redding's lawyers seem to be framing their argument around the rights of parents to send their children to school unmolested, and not around the idea that teen girls should enjoy the right to not be stripped naked by school personnel.
Anyway, I look forward to learning the outcome of this particular case, which the Supreme Court will hear later this month. In the meantime, I remain astonished that the drug in this case isn't meth, or even pot, but is a garden-variety painkiller. The prescription strength stuff doesn't get you high in any way; it just means you can take two pills instead of four.Even in my crazy-draconian high school, you didn't get in trouble for giving your friend an aspirin for her cramps. Good grief.
(Edited to add: There's a link in this story to an article about schools using drug sniffing dogs, and interestingly enough, none of the districts allow students to be personally searched, and the dogs are only used on lockers and cars. I wonder if that's because it's illegal after all, or if they have other reasons. I would love it if someone with more knowledge of the law then I have would weigh in on this subject.)
Related Articles:
Comments
