Dana's already posted on the verdict in Safford Unified School District v. April Redding, but I gotta say it's gotten to the point where I skip to Clarence Thomas' dissents rather than reading the whole opinion first. It's kind of like eating ice cream before dinner.
In an 8-1 ruling, the court decided that school authorities' strip search of 13-year-old Savana Redding in an attempt to find ibuprofen was illegal, with the more liberal justices dissenting from the larger opinion that school officials couldn't be held liable for violating Redding's Fourth Amendment rights.
Thomas, the lone dissenter, took a different view, based on the fact that "drug use and violent crime in the schools have become major social problems." Before we look at Thomas' dissent however, let's look at the Court's description of what happened:
Wilson then had Romero take Savana to the school nurse’s office to search her clothes for pills. After Romero and the nurse, Peggy Schwallier, had Savana remove her outer clothing, they told her to pull her bra out and shake it, and to pull out the elastic on her un-derpants, thus exposing her breasts and pelvic area to some degree. No pills were found.
Thomas doesn't think that the relative danger posed by the drugs should matter, or that school officials should have some reason to believe that you're hiding drugs in your underwear if authorities have already failed to find drugs with a normal search. He concludes:
Easily. I mean it's a total no-brainer, that you'd strip-search a 13-year-old in order to find headache medicine, right? I wonder why the other eight justices had such a hard time figuring that out.Seeking to reconcile the Fourth Amendment with this unique public school setting, the Court in T. L. O. held that a school search is “reasonable” if it is “‘justified at its inception’” and “‘reasonably related in scope to the cir-cumstances which justified the interference in the first place.’” The search under review easily meets this standard.
-- A. Serwer
