FEDERAL COURT SAYS STRIP SEARCH OF TEEN WAS WRONG

The strip search of a 13-year-old Safford school girl to see if she
had drugs was unjustified and excessive, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals ruled Friday.

In a split decision, the full court overruled its own three-judge
panel which had concluded that school officials had reasonable grounds
to believe that the girl was violating either states laws or, at least
school policies. Judge Kim Wardlaw, writing the ruling, said school
officials "acted contrary to all reason and common sense as they
trampled over her legitimate and substantial interests in privacy and
security of her person."

The judge specifically said the tip from an "informant" another
student was unreliable, especially as the girl had never been in
trouble before. And Wardlaw said school officials overreacted given
that they were searching for nothing more than a prescription strength
version of ibuprofen, a pain killer that in smaller doses is sold over
the counter.

But Judge Barry Silverman, writing for the dissent, said he believes
the facts of this case provided school officials with "sufficient
information" to reasonably suspect she had a pill, one which Silverman
said had a high enough dosage to be potentially dangerous to children.

Mark Tregaskes, superintendent of the Safford Unified School District,
said he had not seen the ruling. But Tregaskes said that the school
has made several alterations to its policies since the 2003 incident
that would make it "less likely" a student would be stripped searched
in similar circumstances.

What ultimately led to the search was that girl, caught with some
pills, said she got them from the girl in question here. That occurred
the same time another student told the vice principal some kids were
planning to take drugs.

The girl, under questioning by school officials, denied bringing pills
to school, denied distributing pills to classmates and said consented
to the search.

She was told to pull her bra to the side and shake it, exposing her
breasts, and being told to pull her underwear out of her crotch and
shake it, exposing her pubic area. The search produced nothing.

Her mother subsequently filed suit alleging her daughter's
constitutional rights were violated. But a trial judge threw out the
case, as did a three judge panel of the appellate court.

Wardlaw said the test of whether a search of a student in school is
permissible is whether the actions are reasonably related to the
objectives of the search, the age and sex of the student, and the
nature of the infraction. She said that is designed to balance the
need of schools to maintain order while avoiding "unrestrained
intrusions upon the privacy of schoolchildren."

That, the judge said, did not occur here.

Wardlaw said the basis for the search was the "unsubstantiated tip" of
another student, who had been caught with drugs, "seeking to shift the
blame from herself."

Beyond that, the judge said the search was excessive. Wardlaw said if
school officials were concerned the girl were going to give drugs to
other students they could have just kept her in the principal's office
or sent her home instead of forcing her to remove her clothes.

"And all this to find prescription strength ibuprofen pills," Wardlaw
said. "We reject Safford's efforts to lump together these run of the mill
antiinflammatory pills with the evocative term 'prescription drugs,'
in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young
girl behind a larger war against drugs."

Finally, Wardlaw said the precedent that students have some rights
against unreasonable searches had been set by the U.S. Supreme Court
18 years earlier, and that Kerry Wilson, the assistant principal who
initiated and directed the search, should have been aware that his
actions were illegal.

Tregaskes said the district remains responsible to "protect the
safety" of the students.

"That's always going to be a concern (while) at the same time,
balancing it with constitutional rights," he said. "We've placed
additional safeguards in place so that when situations like this, if
they arrive in the future again, that there are additional checks and
balances, if you want to call that, before we would proceed in doing
searches to the extent that this one was done."