HIGH COURT DRAWS LINE ON SCHOOL STRIP-SEARCH

The Questioning of an Eighth-Grade Girl Went Too Far, Justices Say.

After two decades of giving school officials wide leeway to search
students for drugs or weapons, the Supreme Court set a legal limit on
Thursday, ruling out of bounds the strip-search of a 13-year-old girl
who was suspected of hiding pain relief pills.

In an 8-1 decision, the court called this search degrading,
unreasonable and unconstitutional.

Justice David H. Souter, in what could be his final opinion before
his retirement, said a strip-search is "categorically distinct" from
other efforts to find drugs or weapons on campus because it is
embarrassing and humiliating to the children who are targeted.

In the past, the court has said school officials can search purses,
backpacks or lockers if they have reason to believe a student has
drugs. And twice, justices have upheld mandatory drug testing of high
schoolers, including athletes, even when there was no reason to think
any of them was using drugs.

But requiring a student to remove her clothes goes too far, Souter
said. He suggested such a search would be justified only if a school
official had strong reason to believe a student was hiding a
dangerous drug or a weapon in his or her underwear.

Savana Redding, now 19, whose lawsuit in Arizona led to Thursday's
ruling, said she was pleased and surprised by the outcome. "I'm very
excited and very happy knowing it means this is not likely to happen
to anyone else at school," she said. Redding will attend Eastern
Arizona College this fall, she said.

Her lawyer, Adam Wolf of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he
was encouraged that the court had made clear that students have
privacy rights at school.

"Schoolchildren are not little prisoners subject to search. This says
the Constitution applies in school, and children have rights that
must be respected," he said.

School lawyers read the decision as nearly prohibiting strip-searches.

"We don't think it is a horrible decision, but it is going to limit
the discretion of school officials. They will think long and hard
before they authorize a strip-search in the future," said Naomi
Gittins, a lawyer for the National School Boards Assn.

In 2003, Redding was an eighth-grader in the small town of Safford,
Ariz., near the border with New Mexico. That fall, one boy had gotten
violently ill from taking pills at school. When another girl was
found with several white pills in a folder, she told Vice Principal
Kerry Wilson she got them from Savana. The pills were
prescription-strength ibuprofen, equivalent to two Advil tablets.

Savana said she knew nothing of the pills. Her backpack was searched.
When no pills were found, Wilson sent her to a nurse's office, where
she was told to remove her outer clothes and to pull out her bra and
underwear to check for hidden pills.

Nothing was found, and the school officials did not apologize when
Savana's mother, April, confronted them over the strip-search. The
Reddings then filed suit, alleging a violation of Savana's rights
under the 4th Amendment, which forbids unreasonable searches by the government.

The decision in Safford Unified School District vs. Redding was only
a partial victory for the Reddings, however. The justices threw out
their suit against Wilson and other school officials on the grounds
that the law against strip-searches was not "clearly established" at
the time of incident.

Under federal law, public officials can be sued and held liable if
they violate a person's "clearly established" rights under the
Constitution. Souter noted that until Thursday, judges around the
nation were divided over whether a strip-search at school was unconstitutional.

Thursday's decision sets a standard for all future school searches,
but it may result in no compensation for Savana and her mother. The
court sent the case back to Arizona to consider whether the school
district may face some liability.

Souter agreed that the vice principal had reasonable grounds for
questioning Savana about drugs and for searching her backpack. But he
went much too far, Souter added.

"In sum," he said, "what was missing from the suspected facts that
pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from
the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose
that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear. We think that the
combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable."

Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. He complained that the ruling
"grants judges sweeping authority to second-guess the measures that
these officials take to maintain discipline in their schools and
ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge."

It is the second time this week that Thomas alone has dissented in a
major case. On Monday, the court rejected a challenge to the Voting
Rights Act, but Thomas said he would have struck down the law
provision in question as unconstitutional.

In the school case, Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader
Ginsburg said they would have gone further and upheld a liability
ruling against the school officials in this case.

Quoting from an earlier case, Stevens wrote that he had long believed
that "it does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a
nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional
rights of some magnitude."

Ginsburg, the court's only woman, said the vice principal's conduct
was inexcusable. He had no real evidence to suspect Savana of
wrongdoing: He did not contact her mother, and he made Savana sit in
the office for several hours after the strip-search, she said.

"Abuse of authority of that order should not be shielded by official
immunity," Ginsburg wrote.

Souter will retire after this Monday, when the court's final rulings
are handed down. The nominee to succeed him, Judge Sonia Sotomayor,
has taken a similarly strong stand against strip-searches. In 2004,
she voted to uphold a suit against several Connecticut officials who
had authorized the strip-search of two girls at a juvenile detention center.

These were "troubled adolescent girls facing no criminal charges,"
Sotomayor wrote. Because of strip-searches' potential to humiliate
the victims, she wrote, "we should be especially wary" when children
are targeted.

California and six other states forbid strip-searches at school. The
others are Iowa, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington and
Wisconsin.