Court says strip search of Ariz. teenager illegal
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school’s strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.
In an 8-1 ruling, the justices said school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.
Redding, who now attends college, was 13 when officials at Safford Middle School ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear because they were looking for pills - the equivalent of two Advils. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the school was acting on a tip from another student.
I am somewhat less upset about the search itself than the reason for the search.
Strip searching somebody (which is in itself a punishment) in order to try to find perfectly legal over the counter drugs like Ibuprofen is insane. And the whole “prescription strength” notion is booga-booga bullshit. Clinical doses of Ibuprofen - the size you get in a prescription - are 800 milligrams. That equals 4 of the 200 milligram tablets you by in bottles of 1000 at Costco.
In fact, one time my doctor offered to prescribe Ibuprofen for my back, and I asked him why, when I could buy it at Costco. He shrugged and said, “To let your insurance company pay for it?”
But in fact, my insurance company would have charged me a ten buck deductible for a bottle of 100 of the clinical strength, considerably more per milligram than I paid at Costco. I said no thanks.
So in our nanny-maddened authoritarian state, officials of the state see no problems in violating the Fourth Amendment, apparently because of the Drugs Exception to the Constitution. It, along with the Terror Exception, and the Pedoporn Exception, have essentially rendered that once-robust document ineffective at the business of protecting our liberties.
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I sure hope a civil suit follows, and the individuals are held personally responsible and liable. Not citizens of the school district by way of the tax to cover it if there is a judgement against the school district.
What I don’t like about this decision is that it specifically exempted the individuals who actually performed the strip search from civil liability. They left it up to a lower court to determine if the district could be made liable.
Which is, of course, horseshit. These sorts of violations will never end (or the moronic zero tolerance policies that inspire them) until individuals find themselves destroyed for overstepping the bounds of decency and sanity in pursuit of their authoritarian goals.
I don’t know if I’d reach the same conclusion (though I certainly share the sentiment!)
The entire reason we have moronic zero tolerance policies in the first place is because of the threat of legal liability. “Sure, we know that we’re capable of administering a sane policy. But if we set a policy with any individual discretion or subjective terminology at all, we will inevitably be sued for not exercising that discretion properly, over and over, even in situations where we’re clearly in the right. The district can’t afford to defend against suit after suit after suit. So the only defense is to set a policy with no discretion whatsoever, even if it seems nuts.” Or so they’d claim, anyway, and there’s an element of truth to it too.
Rather than focus on legal liability, I’d prefer for it to become a political liability. The lawsuits just force the district to retreat more and more into a strict lattice of formal policies that make no sense, but lead directly to things like what happened here. But if, instead of threatening to sue the district into a smoking crater, the threat was to unseat the board members who wrote the stupid policy in the first place, the school board would have much more incentive to ensure that their employees at the schools use their brains when it’s necessary… and collect the scalps of the ones who don’t.