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Deanna Zandt DeannaZandt.com
This is truly ludicrous:
SAFFORD, Ariz. -- April Redding was waiting in the parking lot of the middle school when she heard news she could hardly understand: Her 13-year-old daughter, Savana, had been strip-searched by school officials in a futile hunt for drugs.
It's a story that amazes and enrages her still, more than six years later, though she has relived it many times since.
Savana Redding was forced to strip to her underwear in the school nurse's office. She was made to expose her breasts and pubic area to prove she was not hiding pills. And the drugs being sought were prescription-strength ibuprofen, equivalent to two Advils.
"I guess it's the fact that they think they were not wrong, they're not remorseful, never said they were sorry," April Redding said this week, as she and Savana talked about the legal fight over that search, which has now reached the Supreme Court.
And even more: When, days later, the principal met with April Redding to discuss what had happened, she said he was dismissive of an event so humiliating that her daughter never returned to classes at Safford Middle School.
"He said, 'There was an incident with some pills, and we had to find out if Savana had them, but you should be happy because we didn't find any on her,' " Redding recalled. "I got really upset and was telling him, 'Why did you do this to her? How could you do this to her?' "
From the yellow-brick school in this dusty town of cotton fields and copper mines to the Supreme Court, the lawsuit that April and Savana Redding brought carries the potential for redefining the privacy rights of students and the responsibility of teachers and school officials charged with keeping drugs off their campuses.
Matthew W. Wright, the school system's lawyer, declined to make his clients available for interviews. But in a statement, he said he regrets the news media's "reflexive reaction" to the case and underscored the dilemma school officials face between privacy and protection.
"Unfortunately, this tension sometimes places school officials in the untenable position of either facing the threat of lawsuits for their attempts to enforce a drug-free policy or for their laxity in failing to interdict potentially harmful drugs," he wrote.
To which Savana Redding's lawyer, Adam Wolf of the American Civil Liberties Union, replied: "The school official here heard an accusation that Savana previously possessed ibuprofen at some unknown location at some unknown time and jumped to the conclusion that Savana was presently storing ibuprofen and that she was storing it against her genitalia.
"It should be self-evident that that search is wrong."
But the federal judges who have reviewed the case have not been so sure.
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit eventually ruled that the search violated Savana's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and that Vice Principal Kerry Wilson could be found personally liable for ordering the search.
"The public school officials who strip searched Savana acted contrary to all reason and common sense," wrote Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, who reached back to a previous court decision for the quote that has come to define the case:
"It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a thirteen-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude."
On the other hand, it apparently stumped other constitutional scholars. The first judge who heard the Reddings' case agreed with the school system that the search was justified because of accusations that school officials had heard about Savana. He threw out the suit.
A divided three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit upheld that decision.
And while eight judges on the circuit eventually ruled that the search was unconstitutional, several of the judges said Wilson could not have been expected to navigate the shifting legal standards for when such searches are allowed.
I understand that school officials may have to walk a difficult line balancing students' privacy against keeping drugs out of their classrooms, but what about using a little common sense? You don't strip search a 13 year-old girl based on a rumor that she was holding ibuprofen.
Read the whole story. I get the sense that if the principal had simply acknowledged that officials had overreacted, the family wouldn't have pursued the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
But it's good that they did. The article notes, "The backdrop for the case is a 1985 Supreme Court decision that said school officials need to have only reasonable suspicions, rather than probable cause, to search individual students. That case involved the search of a student's purse, but the justices cautioned against a search 'excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction.'"
Aside from the fact that this case certainly appears to be "excessively intrusive" -- remember we're talking about ibuprofen, not smack -- it's also in keeping with the slow erosions or our liberties. The 5th Amendment to the Constitution doesn't say "persons who aren't students in a school" shall not be "deprived of life, liberty or process without due process of law," it just says "persons." Last I checked, school kids are persons too.
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