Court shows good judgment
Ruling in school strip-search case is proper balance of law and empathy
A Thursday ruling from the U. S. Supreme Court shows that President Obama is both right and wrong in his suggestion that his nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor will bring some much-needed empathy to the high court.
Right, in that basic human feelings and values will and should always be used in interpreting the law and the Constitution. Wrong, in any suggestion that the current court lacks any understanding of what it is like to be a helpless person abused by public officials.
In an 8-1 ruling, the court correctly said that an Arizona middle school official violated the Constitution’s ban on “unreasonable searches” when he had a 13-year-old girl strip-searched in a fruitless hunt for some double-strength Advil.
The decision was written by Justice David Souter, the person Sotomayor is to replace. He ruled that while school officials have more latitude to search for contraband than do, say, police on the street, there are limits. And those limits were clearly crossed by the actions of an anti-drug-obsessed vice principal.
The basic facts were not in dispute. Another girl was caught with some pills—both prescription and over-thecounter— that were not illegal drugs but that were banned from the school by its own rules. That girl ratted out one Savana Redding as the source of her stash.
Redding, then and now, denies the charge. When nothing was found in her backpack, Vice Principal Kerry Wilson ordered two female staff members to take Redding into another room and watch as she removed her clothing and shifted her bra and panties enough to allow them to check for any hidden pills. Again, none was found.
Redding sued and, after conflicting rulings at various levels, took her case to the Supreme Court.
A few months ago, as the justices heard the school district’s lawyer demand the right to do just about anything to maintain an ibuprofen-free zone around the schools, they peppered Redding’s lawyer with some tough questions. But Thursday the court was clear in its ruling that the violation of a young girl’s personal space, if not her psyche, in a hunt for such minor contraband crossed the line.
This case shows how Supreme Court justices are not, and cannot be, automatons who dispassionately rule on what the law says without any taint of personal feeling. The Constitution bans “unreasonable” searches, and leaves it to the courts to define what kind of search, under each circumstance, is reasonable.
To weigh a school’s need to protect its students from genuine harm against the constitutionally guaranteed “right of people to be secure in their persons,” is, and forever will be, a judgment call. That’s why we call them judges.
The court made the right call on this one. It did so, not just because its members can read the law, but because at least eight of them can imagine what it must be like to be a helpless child psychically violated by a powerful adult.
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