TEEN'S STRIP-SEARCH GOES TO HIGH COURT

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 and expose her breasts and pubic area to prove she was
not hiding pills 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.

The lawsuit 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 Wright, the school system's lawyer, said in a statement 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 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals 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.

Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw 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 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.

"Searches are often fruitless, and students' motives are often benign,
but teachers, unlike courts, do not act with the benefit of
hindsight," wrote Judge Michael Daly Hawkins.

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Backdrop

A 1985 Supreme Court decision said school officials need to have only
reasonable suspicions, rather than probable cause, to search
individual students. That case involved the search of a 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."