Fausta's Blog

Following up on the Safford Middle School strip search case, an 8-1 decision:

Supreme Court Rules School’s Strip Search of Girl Was Illegal

The Supreme Court ruled today that Arizona school officials violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old girl when they subjected her to a strip search on the suspicion she might be hiding ibuprofen in her underwear.

The court ruled 8-1 that such an intrusive search without the threat of a clear danger to other students violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search or seizure.

Lyle Denniston, writing at SCOTUS blog points out that :

The new rule is that searching students’ inner clothing, with exposure of their bodies, will be extremely difficult — though not impossible — to justify.
…
The other constitutional rule — searches of public school students’ backpacks, notebooks, other belongings, outer clothing, and pockets are generally allowed if they are based on “reasonable suspicion” — remains as it has for a quarter-century, but with a small amount of refinement, the exact scope of which is not quite clear.

And,

Thursday’s decision only applies to future searches, so the Constitution does not provide them a remedy.

And, hopefully, this will prevent cavity searches, too.

You can read the decision here (h/t Reason).

Tags: Fausta's blog, Safford Middle School, Savana Redding, Supreme Court

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 2:04 pm and is filed under education, SCOTUS, society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.