Strip search of pupil, 13, ruled illegal

WASHINGTON - The strip search of a 13-year-old schoolgirl who was suspected of hiding pain-relief pills was unreasonable and unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday, setting new legal limits on how far school officials may go to inspect for drugs on campus.

In an 8-1 decision, with only Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting, the court called a strip search at school "categorically distinct" from other inspections for drugs and so degrading that it usually cannot be justified.

A search of a student's backpack or outer clothing is reasonable whenever a school employee has sufficient suspicion that the student is hiding something illegal, such as drugs or a weapon, the justices said.

But requiring a student to remove clothes requires a "quantum leap" of suspicion and wrongdoing to be justified, the court ruled in Safford United School District v. Redding.

The ruling was a partial victory for Savana Redding and her mother, April Redding, who sued the vice principal of her Arizona middle school over a strip search in 2003. Another girl had told the vice principal that Savana had brought in extra-strength ibuprofen pills - equal to two Advils - and planned to give them to other students.

Savana was questioned and denied having the pills, and her backpack was searched. When no pills were found, the vice principal sent her to a nurse's office, where she was ordered to remove her clothes.

No pills were found, but school officials did not apologize to the girl or her mother. The two sued the employees and the Safford Unified School District, contending that the strip search violated Savana's rights under the Fourth Amendment, which forbids "unreasonable searches" by the government.

The justices yesterday agreed that the search was unconstitutional, but they rejected the suit against the school employees because the law had not been clear.

The ruling sets a standard for future school searches, but it may result in no compensation for Savana and her mother. The court sent the case back to Arizona to consider whether the school district may face some liability.

Several states, including New Jersey, already ban strip searches of students, and that is also the policy in a number of Pennsylvania school districts, including Philadelphia and Upper Darby.

Rob Partridge, communications director for the West Chester Area School District, said, "We would never put a student through that level of investigation without his or her parent's notification."

Justice David H. Souter said Savana Redding's vice principal had reasonable grounds for questioning the students about drugs but went too far.

"What was missing," Souter wrote for the majority in perhaps his final court opinion, "was an indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear."

Thomas, in his dissent, contended that the ruling "grants judges sweeping authority to second-guess the measures that these officials take to maintain discipline in their schools and ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge."

Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have gone further and upheld a liability ruling against the school officials.

"It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude," Stevens wrote.

Redding, now in college, said she was pleased with the ruling. "I'm pretty excited about it, because that's what I wanted," she said. "I wanted to keep it from happening to anybody else."

Also yesterday, on its second-to-last day of issuing decisions from its 2008-09 term, the Supreme Court:

Criticized a federal court's supervision of the way Arizona provides language instruction to non-English-speaking students, and raised questions about whether that federal court overstepped boundaries in dictating how states provide services. The Supreme Court's liberal dissenters said the 5-4 decision in Horne vs. Flores "risks denying schoolchildren the English-learning instruction necessary to overcome the language barriers that impede their equal participation."

Ruled 5-4 that forensic reports prepared for criminal trials are the same as testimony for the prosecution, and that the analysts who prepare them must be available for cross-examination by defense lawyers. The dissenters in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts said the ruling could have a debilitating effect on the criminal justice system.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule Monday

in the remaining cases

of its term. They are:

Ricci v. DeStefano: After New Haven, Conn., threw out a promotional exam for firefighters because too few minority candidates qualified, a predominantly white group of firefighters sued, alleging racial discrimination. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was part of an appeals court panel that upheld the city's action.

Citizens United v. FEC: The question is whether federal campaign-finance law barred a conservative group last year from advertising or broadcasting a documentary critical of then-candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton during the presidential primaries.

Cuomo v. Clearing House Association: At issue in this New York case is states' authority to investigate race discrimination in mortgage lending.

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Read the justices' opinions in the school strip-search case via http://go.philly.com/stripEndText