The US Supreme Court was poised to hear arguments yesterday over whether school administrators went too far when they searched the underwear of a 13-year-old girl looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen pills.
The Safford, Arizona, Unified School District is appealing a federal appeals court decision that would allow Savana Redding to sue the Safford Middle School officials who searched her based on the accusation of a fellow student.
School officials say the search was reasonable and justified because pills had been found on campus and another student had linked them to Redding.
Redding’s lawyers say, however, that school officials violated the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches.
Redding, now a 19-year-old college freshman living in her hometown of Safford in rural eastern Arizona, said she would never forget the humiliation of the search.
“I’ll think about it constantly,” she said.
The Supreme Court was also expected to issue opinions yesterday.
A 1985 Supreme Court decision that dealt with searching a student’s purse has found that school officials need only reasonable suspicion, not probable cause. But the court also warned against a search that is “excessively intrusive.”
A schoolmate had accused Redding, then an eighth-grade student, of giving her pills. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs from school.
Vice Principal Kerry Wilson took Redding to his office to search her backpack. When nothing was found, Redding was taken to a nurse’s office, where she says she was ordered to take off her shirt and pants. Redding said they then told her to move her bra to the side and to stretch her underwear waistband, exposing her breasts and pelvic area.
No pills were found.
Redding says school officials did not have reasonable grounds to believe she was hiding pills in her underwear and that the pills did not pose a public health threat serious enough to justify a strip search.
School officials say they did not violate her rights and courts should defer to school officials’ judgment in situations involving potential drug abuse on school grounds.
A federal magistrate had dismissed the lawsuit that Redding and her mother April brought, and a federal appeals panel agreed that the search didn’t violate her rights. But last July, a full panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals found the search was “an invasion of constitutional rights.”
The court also said Wilson could be found personally liable.
If the court finds the search was unconstitutional, it will have to decide whether school officials can be held financially liable by determining whether it should have been clear to them in October 2003 that the search was illegal.
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