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.
No wonder public schools want to eliminate homeschooling so much. It’s more than education and leftist indoctrination, creating good little obedient socialists. They’re trying to use the schools as policing entities; just another foot in the door of controlling the unwashed masses.
Only a dim would consider a butter knife a *weapon*. Fer cryin’ out loud, hands and feet probably kill more people than butter knives. What should we do? Outlaw them as well? Amputate them at birth to you have a really defenseless populace. I’m sure some dem or principal Stalinist type would love to implement something like that if they could just work out the details.
Nobody is going to train my kids to spy on me. My kids are not going to be subservient little automons who do exactly what the state tells them. Nobody is going to tell me how to run my house and what I can have and where.
I take back my assessment of principal. I’d guess ACLU lawyer. They’re the only ones who make a lowlife bottom feeder look like a great leap forward in evolution.
Plaintiff/Appellant Redding's Petition For Rehearing En Banc.
The en banc panel are:Alex Kozinski, Harry Pregerson, Michael D. Hawkins, Barry G. Silverman, Kim M. Wardlaw, Raymond C. Fisher, Ronald M. Gould, Richard A. Paez, Carlos T. Bea, Milan D. Smith, Jr., N. Randy Smith
Redding v. Safford - National Association of Social Workers Brief
If you think that Republicans are all for strip-searching 13 year old girls, you should read the blogging on GOP USA.
One post reads "The ignorant swine!Now I've seen everything. We have crotch inspectors and the ACLU coming out agin' 'em. ACLU on our side? Is the world coming to an end?"
And DU Troll.
Yes we got that already. Your problem is that you cannot keep in mind what that means - that she is the victim, a minor, and not the perpetrator. I know it is rather complicated to keep it all straight in your poor feeble wittle bwain, but try.
There is no brain. Just a black hole that twists and distorts anything that comes near it.
I just got off the phone with RP. He was on his break at his busboy job at IHop. He says to tell his surrogate to bring home a 50 pound bag of gerbil chow and a case of Preparation-H on the way home.
Whatever one might say about the ACLU, given the quality of the briefs in this case, if it were my civil rights at risk, I would welcome having the ACLU on my side. It is a well written and researched brief, but then a lot of ACLU briefs are. That is how they keep winning cases.
Funny, I just got off the phone with IHOP. They tell me there is missing bottle of strawberry syrup. I heard that RP took it. We need a strip search to look for it. Someone else said that Mojave might had told him to take it. I guess we need another strip search. The right of a conspiracy of Freepers to make arbitrary regulations shouldn't be overridden by this silly thing we call the US Constitution you know.
From the info in the NASW amicus brief in your post, I don’t think this is going to end up being decided in the authoritarian perverts’ favor. In the brief it shows that the 7th circuit has already weighed in on a similar case saying:
“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. More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human decency.”
“We suggest as strongly as possible that the conduct herein described exceeded the “bounds of reason” by two and a half country miles......”
I heard that rumor too. That is definitely enough corroboration for a strip search. I don’t want to be there myself. Maybe some other FReeper will volunteer.
Even were we to grant the argument that it should be left to the local community to deal with, independent of federal constitutional standards, you have posed no argument as to why the local community should find this strip search acceptable.
Stripped of federal oversight, and left to the local community, why should it not be the case that dads from the local community get together, boil up some tar, feather these school officials and ride them out of town on a rail? That is after all, how we used to deal with local issues back in the days of our founding fathers, and before we had federal court intervention. Under those ground rules, I am all for letting the local community deal with this. I suspect you are less for local rule than I, however.
And maybe one of the many perverts on the 9th circuit court.
This would be bad for the so-called education system, how, exactly?
This is the appropriate way to deal with all authoritarian perverts, their enablers and supporters.
Let’s see: gerbils, Preparation-H, rubber sheets, cooking oil and now purloined IHop brand strawberry syrup...hmmmm......Why would the authoritarianists need that odd assortment of items?
I think that the historical evidence would suggest that educational standards, student behavior, and general societal decorum were far better when that was the standard punishment for breaching social norms. I will leave it for others so inclined to mount a refutation of the premise.
Add some feathers to that concoction and we are most of the way there, I think.
And all you've done is post transparent falsehoods and sourceless fantasies.
Leftists hate facts.
No surprise there.
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