Posted on 04/02/2008 3:39:20 PM PDT by neverdem
There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who think it's perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.
It also includes two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, who last fall ruled that the strip search did not violate Savana's Fourth Amendment rights. The full court, which recently heard oral arguments in the case, now has an opportunity to overturn that decision and vote against a legal environment in which schoolchildren are conditioned to believe government agents have the authority to subject people to invasive, humiliating searches on the slightest pretext.
Safford Middle School has a "zero tolerance" policy that prohibits possession of all drugs, including not just alcohol and illegal intoxicants but prescription medications and over-the-counter remedies, "except those for which permission to use in school has been granted." In October 2003, acting on a tip, Vice Principal Kerry Wilson found a few 400-milligram ibuprofen pills (each equivalent to two over-the-counter tablets) and one nonprescription naproxen tablet in the pockets of a student named Marissa, who claimed Savana was her source.
Savana, an honors student with no history of disciplinary trouble or drug problems, said she didn't know anything about the pills and agreed to a search of her backpack, which turned up nothing incriminating. Wilson nevertheless instructed a female secretary to strip-search Savana under the school nurse's supervision, without even bothering to contact the girl's mother.
The secretary had Savana take off all her clothing except her underwear. Then she told her to "pull her bra out and to the side and shake it, exposing her breasts," and "pull her underwear out at the crotch and shake it, exposing her pelvic area." Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between drug warriors and child molesters.
"I was embarrassed and scared," Savana said in an affidavit, "but felt I would be in more trouble if I did not do what they asked. I held my head down so they could not see I was about to cry." She called it "the most humiliating experience I have ever had." Later, she recalled, the principal, Robert Beeman, said "he did not think the strip search was a big deal because they did not find anything."
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that a public school official's search of a student is constitutional if it is "justified at its inception" and "reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place." This search was neither.
When Wilson ordered the search, the only evidence that Savana had violated school policy was the uncorroborated accusation from Marissa, who was in trouble herself and eager to shift the blame. Even Marissa (who had pills in her pockets, not her underwear) did not claim that Savana currently possessed any pills, let alone that she had hidden them under her clothes.
Savana, who was closely supervised after Wilson approached her, did not have an opportunity to stash contraband. As the American Civil Liberties Union puts it, "There was no reason to suspect that a thirteen-year-old honor-roll student with a clean disciplinary record had adopted drug-smuggling practices associated with international narcotrafficking, or to suppose that other middle-school students would willingly consume ibuprofen that was stored in another student's crotch."
The invasiveness of the search also has to be weighed against the evil it was aimed at preventing. "Remember," the school district's lawyer recently told ABC News by way of justification, "this was prescription-strength ibuprofen." It's a good thing the school took swift action, before anyone got unauthorized relief from menstrual cramps.
© Copyright 2008 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
Liberal on a spit roasting over mesquite charcoal is good too! Although some say the meat is too tough and full of gristle.
Yeah, those states use actual food in their cooking... :^)
Lackluster SAT scores is not indicative of a dimwit.
SAT scores are also a pretty good proxy for IQ.
No, it absolutely isn't, nor was it ever meant to be. It was only ever meant to be a predictor of how someone might do his or her freshman year in college.
Thanks for the link. Very interesting reading. However, nothing there changes the basic facts of this case; your link simply gave more detail about the basics we already knew: the second girl was implicated on nothing but the word of the first girl---who sounded even more like a troublemaker than I thought she was---and nothing more. We return to where we began: from uncorroborated accusation to strip search. I find it absolutely appalling you think there is nothing wrong with that. Fundamentally, this is no different from the cops giving you the commander-one-hander because some random passer-by on the street fingered you as a drug mule. I doubt you would be okay with that if it happened to you.
Maybe Marissa comes from a broken home; maybe Marissa doesn't have anyone at home who would stand up for her; maybe Marissa has a couple of chuckleheads for parents who don't understand that her rights were violated; mabye Marissa's parents are just like you---they think it's perfectly okay if their kid was strip-searched at school. After all, there are some really sick people out there.
I like the cut of you jib, Hemingway! Cutting through the Bravo Sierra is your strong point!
Back at you, 'cuz. We fight the good fight, one battle at a time.
Good picture!
Not a cuz, just from a military family, hence the familiarity with the lingo. Father was an Air Force fighter pilot, older brother Naval Reserve, lots of uncles and cousins sprinkled in all the services and wars -WWI, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf War. I do work with the military as part of my civilian job, but can't tell you how because it "wouldn't be prudent."
The pictures are just a goof off from last night. I’ll post better ones later. New tag.
Yes. The correlation is fairly strong. About 80 to 90 percent. It isn't just one study that shows this.
Maybe the SAT wasn't intended to be a proxy for IQ but so what, it is.
Generally speaking, half of public school teachers are dimwits. In Philadelphia half of public school teachers failed the state teaching test but they are still employed as teachers.
Given the current hysteria over obesity and junk food, do you really think that won't happen?
Sexual abuse of kids by women is more common than you may think.
Okay, let’s compromise-—I’ll expand my definition of dimwit to include anyone who continues to insist that performance on a standardized test indicates anything other than a minimal amount of proficiency at doing what the standardized test was designed to test. Next up: good MCAS scores mean a lifetime batting average of .350 or better.
You DO know that ibuprofen is not illegal, don't you? Or are you saying that your neighbourhood pharmacist is in for a world of hurt?
Melts in your mouth, not in your...
Nevermind.
I swear the new policies of keeping meds in the school office are going to kill someone if they haven't already. When I was in school there were no rules of any kind about meds- it was understood that any medication, prescribed or OTC, was the responsibility of the student taking it.
So would I, just for the pleasure of hearing the Crown declare, "We are withdrawing the charge as there are no reasonable prospects for conviction."
It’s got to be full of gristle. Liberals are the most sour, bitter, angry people I’ve met. Of course they’d be tough and chewy.
My kids are citizens of this country. The Constitution applies to them as well as any one.
I'd like to see in the Constitution where there are exemptions from our rights based on age or what educational establishment they are attending.
Surely if the Framers though anyone under the age of 18 didn't have any rights, they would have spelled that out.
Just because some addled brained judge somewhere decides that being in a public school automatically implies forfeiture of one's Constitutional rights, doesn't make it so.
There are no exemptions for people based in age from the rights afforded us in the Constitution.
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