A COMMON-SENSE RULING ON STRIP SEARCHES

A Supreme Court Decision Lays Down a Bright Line for School Officials.

Common sense and constitutional law don't always come to the same
conclusion, but the U.S. Supreme Court has done justice to both in
ruling that an Arizona middle school violated the 4th Amendment by
subjecting a 13-year-old girl to a strip search. With only Justice
Clarence Thomas dissenting, the court has drawn a bright line that
school officials will transgress at their legal peril. It also has
nudged other states to join California and six more states that ban
strip searches of students by school authorities.

Savana Redding was in eighth grade when school officials, suspecting
that she was concealing prescription-strength ibuprofen, ordered her
to remove her clothes and stretch out her bra and underpants. The
search was unconstitutional, Justice David H. Souter wrote for the
court, for two reasons: The officials lacked reasonable suspicion
that Savana was hiding drugs in her underwear, and the drugs in
question, even if she had possessed them, posed no danger to
students. That double requirement would seem to prohibit strip
searches except in the rarest of cases -- for example, when officials
have a good reason to suspect that a student has secreted hard drugs
or a weapon in her clothes.

In laying down this legal test, Souter displayed an admirable
awareness that "adolescent vulnerability intensifies the patent
intrusiveness" of a strip search. He dismissed the notion that what
Savanna endured was no more traumatic than being observed changing
clothes before gym. In an interview after oral arguments in the case,
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg worried that her male colleagues might
not have recognized that 13 is "a very sensitive age for a girl." In
the end, the male justices "got it" -- but they also recognized that
it isn't only girls who would feel violated by a full body search.
The exception was Thomas, who in a previous case made clear that he
doubts whether schoolchildren of either gender have meaningful
constitutional rights.

Given the outrageousness of this search, it might seem obvious that
the court would rule as it did. But, until this decision, the law was
unclear (which is why the court said the individuals who ordered
Savana's search couldn't be sued for damages, though the school
district could still be held liable). Moreover, comments by the
justices at oral arguments suggested that they were torn. Even Souter
wrestled with the concern that justice for Savana might prevent
school administrators in other cases from responding promptly to a
serious drug-abuse problem.

That won't be a problem if schools follow the guidelines in Souter's
opinion. Better yet, they would be spared such decisions by laws in
every state banning strip searches by school officials. If such
searches are needed to protect schools and students, they should be
done by police.