Middle-School Strip Search Ruled Unconstitutional 528
yuna49 writes "The US Supreme Court today ruled 8-1 that the strip search of a 13-year-old girl by officials in an Arizona middle school was unconstitutional. However, by a vote of 7-2, the Court also ruled that the individual school officials could not be held personally liable. A suit for damages against the school district itself is still going forward. We discussed this case at length back in March when the Court decided to hear the case on appeal."
Re:This is America (Score:4, Interesting)
This is America, where children are the Enemy.
If you've ever had to be responsible for a bunch of kids, you would understand.
Now, I don't agree with strip searching kids, especially for something stupid like Advil or something. However, the second you state that school officials are not allowed to check your underwear, that's where everything starts getting hidden. Unfortunately, the only way to keep this from being abused and still having some effectiveness would be to publicly allow this type of search, but ban it privately.
It seems that the judge agrees with me. From TFA:
Had Savana been suspected of having illegal drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to herself and other students, the strip search, too, might have been justified, the majority said, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter.
I also hope that the student that gave the "tip" that this poor girl had pills in her underwear gets an ass-whoopin severe enough to make her grandkids wince when sitting down!
Re:And the "!" in the 8 to 1 is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Clarence Thomas, who 'asserted that the majority's finding second-guesses the measures that educators take to maintain discipline "and ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge."'
I can't imagine how forcing a 13-year old girl to strip ensures anyone's health and safety, especially since they were looking for IBUPROFIN, for heaven's sake.
The majority agrees with that part. From TFA:
Had Savana been suspected of having illegal drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to herself and other students, the strip search, too, might have been justified, the majority said, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter.
Re:My Rights Online? (Score:3, Interesting)
They posted pics of the whole thing online. I would have sued about that too, but then again, they were suprisingly tasteful. I mean, she did use one of them as her yearbook photo.
Re:And the "!" in the 8 to 1 is... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't imagine how forcing a 13-year old girl to strip ensures anyone's health and safety,
If they were looking for something really dangerous, on the basis of credible evidence, I'd be the first to applaud them. It sucks, but kids have been used for fighting before [wikipedia.org].
However, in this case they were just enforcing a "zero common sense" policy.
Re:This is America (Score:2, Interesting)
Wasn't there some third reich psychologist who came to America during Paperclip and was known for espousing that the only way to govern a nation was to make the majority of the citizens your enemy? Or prevent them from being able to get through life without breaking the law at some point or something?
I can't find a link - but your comment reminded me of this.
Re:This is America (Score:5, Interesting)
Awhile back in a suburb of San Diego, an overzealous administrator had the good idea to round up [signonsandiego.com] all of the girls at the dance and check their panties so that the filthy whores wearing thongs(or less) could be sent home to change.
And about that, from the link:
Garvik's sophomore daughter was forced to go home and change before she could enter the dance, although thongs are not barred in the school dress code. The code states that undergarments, including "boxers, tank-top undershirts or underwear" should not be exposed.
Some people with authority(especially those in certain government agencies, but I digress) seem to make up the rules as they go along. That's what makes them dangerous.
Public Servants -- !!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is America (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is school districts think they are god and above the law. They get even more power hungry than the most power hungry cop, and much less accountable.
For instance, a year or two back, a girl claimed she was sexually assaulted in the stairway of a school.
What did the school do?
Call the cops?
No.
Call the parents?
No.
They sent a teacher to go 'investigate' the stairway. Instead of you know, calling the cops, who are trained in questioning and scene investigation, they send a portly tenured person down to go contaminate the scene because they didn't know what the hell they were doing.
This is just a lighter one of their instances of pulling that shit. They always like to try and bury things before they get outside the school or to the press, and often tried to intimidate kids into not talking about something.
Re:All bark, no bite (Score:3, Interesting)
I want a return to an old principle: "A government official cannot, by definition, act outside the law or their authority, because when they do they are not acting in an official capacity and shall not be treated as if they were.".
Re:This is America (Score:2, Interesting)
Strange, isn't it? The people I've met there are reasonable.
Maybe...but don't forget about the broomstick incident [wikipedia.org], noose incident [wikipedia.org], and hacking incident [wikipedia.org] aside from the aforementioned underwear check.
But maybe I'm just biased, my spoiled bitchy ex also attended Rancho Bernardo High school. To clarify, the school is in a very well-off part of San diego, not in some Santee or Barrio Logan ghetto!
Re:Clarence Thomas's Copy of the Constitution (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny, because as a "strict constructionist" he is usually credited as one that applies the Constitution exactly as written, i.e. more towards a limited, libertarian view. In this opinion, though, it was the liberal wing that most closely sided with the child being strip-searched in violation of her (or her parents') constitutional rights.
Re:This is time to act. (Score:3, Interesting)
Court also ruled that the individual school officials could not be held personally liable
If the courts won't hold them liable, than the people must!
That was my first thought. My grandfather told a story one time of his teacher doing something humiliating to him at school. When he told his mother, she went to school with a hatchet in hand. She didn't use it, but the problem was resolved.
I don't recommend doing something that extreme, but it's obvious that people are too much of sheep nowadays to fix these problems. Honestly, this shouldn't have involved a court to begin with. Those responsible should have been publicly humiliated and forced to resign.
So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Interesting)
But if that same girl willingly texts me a cellphone pic of herself in a bikini, I'm looking at time in hard prison and branded a sex offender for life.
Seems perfectly logical to me.
Re:Clarence Thomas's Copy of the Constitution (Score:2, Interesting)
Justice Thomas does not believe that the Fourth Amendment is "null and void." Rather, he does not believe that there is a Constitutional right to privacy. It's fact that the word 'privacy' doesn't once appear in the U.S. Constitution. Justice Douglas created it in Griswold v. Connecticut, and a majority of his colleagues voted in favor of it.
As Justice Thomas doesn't believe in stare decisis, period, it's not surprising that he is still fighting against the "right to privacy."
Re:Qualified Immunity (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in the US, public schools are typically surrounded by barbed wire, and not a small number have metal detectors at the doors. There's typically even a local police officer patrolling the halls in addition to the hired security.
The general perception of a school in the US as a locked-down secure facility really blurs the line. "Reasonable" persons have a completely different frame of reference over here than they do over there..
Or are your schools just as fucked up as ours? If they are, my hypothesis is totally wrong.
Stevens rips into Thomas (Score:3, Interesting)
When Thomas was nominated to Brennan's seat, the biggest complaint I remember was not Anita Hill or his ideology, but his skills. To be on the Supreme Court ou're supposed to be a scholar.
Re:This is America (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Clarence Thomas's Copy of the Constitution (Score:1, Interesting)
That's because, for the court, as well as the rest of the United States, "conservative" no longer means small, limited government. It means that the government can do no wrong.
Re:This is America (Score:2, Interesting)
Mods, skip this post as it has nothing to do with the story, I just want to help easyTree out ;)
I was actually posting about this here because I was hoping that someone more current in conspiracy research could remind me of some missing parts of my recollection.
It has been years, but I remember more as I think about this. I can tell you where to look, but I am no longer interested enough to dig through all the FOIA paperwork - which is where I saw just enough substantiating evidence to pique my interest in some otherwise totally unsupported assertions that a guy I knew made.
Some search terms for further research are 'artichoke' 'bluebird' and 'mkultra' - the last of which I would expect most people to recognize. These were all American 'human factor' experiments which were fascinating to my adolescent mind back when I heard about them in the late eighties/early nineties.
My 'source' - if we can call him that - told me that the 'psychological nature' (his words, not mine) of the war on drugs made him suspect a nazi psychologist's students were taking control of America.
Unfortunately, my source was a blow-hard conspiracy theorist, and I couldn't find out anything about the psychologist he cited beyond what was published in an amateur conspiracy rag.
I should note here that I suspected my source of being the author of the amateur piece simply due to the scarcity of any corroborating evidence for his outlandish claims about the expansion of mkultra to the general populace through the war on drugs.
Then, a number of years later I saw a documentary that was on French Canadian tv that made reference to some newly released documents that connected human factor experiments performed in a Montreal(?) sanitarium to the American human factor experiments.
Furthermore, and I don't recall the original source for this - it may have been the documentary - former third reich scientists who could not work in the US because of relations to Nuremburg figures were running the Canadian project directly or advising on site in some manner.
IIRC the experiments were later acknowledged both by Canada and by Bill Clinton and some sort of reparation was either made or being publicly sought by survivors of the experiments.
At some point during all of this I saw this nazi referenced definitively with relation to the design of post-war Allied human factor research. Unfortunately, I used to read a lot of FOIA stuff and I think that is where you are going to have to go for more.
Anyhow, I now had some substantiation that my source had somehow gotten hold of at least a thread of truth about the presence of a nazi scientist who had maintained a very low profile.
That is flimsy support for the detailed charges that had been made, though, and you can search other scientists from that period in America to find plenty of amateur conspiracy fluff supported by equally flimsy evidence.
J.W.Parsons is one example. He supposedly was paying an insider to put aborted fetuses around the Los Alamos testing grounds to see if they would reanimate.. and he founded JPL. If you are not American I would remind you that this is the time period of Roswell/the birth of American UFO mania and is ripe for exploitation by amateur conspiracy theorists - so it is not unusual to find this type of conspiracy from this time period.
Finally, this is where everything verifiable ends and we are left only with the word of a nut about the way in which mkultra was being applied to the American populace. ... AND HERE IT IS! :
Our anonymous nazi scientist had developed a new take on the results of the human factor experiments and redefined the fight-flight continuum which was defined at the time by the three observable states of a sentient being during a self-preservation reflex response: Fight/Camouflage/Flight.
Our nazi concluded that both 'flight' and 'camouflage' reflex reactions belonged in the same meta-category because after exhibiting a camo re
Re:This is America (Score:2, Interesting)
you call the police and let THEM deal with it. That's why we HAVE police to begin with.
That's not what the police are for. The are here to:
Sodomize you during a search [dailypress.com]
Tase you if you are a minor [tallahassee.com]
Screw the same women while on duty [citrusdaily.com]
Steal computer information [wwlp.com]
Lie and perjure themselves under oath [nytimes.com]
Threaten you [2theadvocate.com]
Rape your children [nwanews.com]
Murder your children and abuse you [tbo.com]
Strange. That's only a 12-hours news window. I'd hate to see the abuses heaped upon us by government employees who are here to keep us safe if it were a counted over a year...
Re:Clarence Thomas's Copy of the Constitution (Score:3, Interesting)
This is an issue of the government conducting an unreasonable search without a warrant. If Justice Thomas did not believe in stare decisis he would have not only ruled the search unconstitutional but he would have held the school personnel liable since confusing precedent is irrelevant.
This is an excellent example of what the strict constructionist crowd fails to understand. When the constitution was written it did not apply to schools at all. It wasn't until the 14th amendment that the fourth amendment applied outside the federal government. The constitution clearly applies to public schools but at the time the 14th amendment was ratified most voters had never attended a public school. I think the notion that schools would function as law enforcement at that time would have been considered absurd.
Re:Whos the oddball (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember, Clarence Thomas was the one who was accused by Anita Hill of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings, and got away with it. So why should it surprise anyone that he would find it perfectly acceptable for a government employee to strip search a 13 year-old girl? His dissent was the closest he could get to saying "Hot damn, I wish I'd been there to do it myself!" The man is a misogynist and a perv and the only reason why he was confirmed was because of his race.
Seriously, Justice Thomas, Scalia, and Alito are the three Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Roberts is the understudy. The problem is that they have such a narrow, literal understanding of constitutional law that they utterly fail to appreciate how laws only have meaning when they are understood in the larger context of the needs of a diverse and ever-changing society. The Founding Fathers understood the Constitution to be a living document. No one so capable of drafting such words could possibly be so stupid or arrogant as to believe that the laws they created are forever perfectly formed. They knew they could not anticipate how American society would change over the centuries. The conservatives' insistence on the immutability of the Constitution is merely an excuse set forth in order to justify their attempts to holding onto power, even if it means denying entire classes of citizens their human rights.
Re:Clarence Thomas's Copy of the Constitution (Score:2, Interesting)
No, you think it's an issue of the government conducting an unreasonable search without a warrant. If you read Justice Thomas's dissent [cornell.edu], he explains why he believes the search was reasonable.
With regard to "strict construction[ism]," first, it is a meaningless phrase. No one on the Supreme Court self-identifies as a "strict constructionist." Justice Scalia, the one most associated with the term, dismisses it as a "degraded form of textualism..." and wishes that no one be a strict constructionist.
Now, the more important point: there is no misunderstanding here. The Constitution is not a living document; it is a dead one. So, that the Constitution "did not [originally] apply to schools" is not a problem whatsoever. An amendment changed that, and that's the way change ought to be effected. The judiciary is not in the business of creating anything; they are merely interpreters. The legislature is in the business of creating laws.