High School Strip Search Case goes to Supreme Court

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

Something needs to be done about drugs in school.

Welcome to The War On Drugs, ladies and gentlemen. Extremism in defense of loss of liberty is no vice.

Originally Posted by Aliantha

So it turned out to be nothing this time, but how bout next time when they do find cocain or heroin? Will there be any uproar then?

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that this specific case was not about any illegal drug, yeah, I'd still have a problem with it. If they really have reason to believe the kid has drugs hidden on their body, then I expect them to call the police. I also expect them to call me.

Originally Posted by Aliantha

I don't agree with cavity searches. I think kids that're that serious about dealing drugs would do it outside of school hours, plus most school kids wouldn't want to buy something that came out of another students arsehole would they? (I'm sure there'd be a few though)

So... you don't think the cavity search is wrong, you just don't think it would yield results often enough to be worth the trouble?

Originally Posted by Aliantha

If they thought my son had drugs in his posession I'd have no objection to a same sex teacher doing a strip search.

More power to you. In this country, however, we have, or had, something called the Fourth Amendment. And I've had it up to here with moronic "zero tolerance" policies. If your son really were dealing heroin out of his jeans, would it really make a difference to have him cool his heels for an hour or two--yes, supervised, with somebody keeping an eye on him at all times--to do things RIGHT, you know, with due process and all that other lame shit, instead of somebody deciding they know how to handle it because they saw Law & Order?

[Aliantha]

Originally Posted by SteveDallas

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that this specific case was not about any illegal drug, yeah, I'd still have a problem with it. If they really have reason to believe the kid has drugs hidden on their body, then I expect them to call the police. I also expect them to call me.

Who knew it was not about illegal drugs till they discovered it was ibuprophen? I'd guess the school had no idea what 'drugs' the child had till they'd found them.


So... you don't think the cavity search is wrong, you just don't think it would yield results often enough to be worth the trouble?

I don't think it's appropriate, but I also don't think it'd yield anything 99.9% of the time.


More power to you. In this country, however, we have, or had, something called the Fourth Amendment. And I've had it up to here with moronic "zero tolerance" policies. If your son really were dealing heroin out of his jeans, would it really make a difference to have him cool his heels for an hour or two--yes, supervised, with somebody keeping an eye on him at all times--to do things RIGHT, you know, with due process and all that other lame shit, instead of somebody deciding they know how to handle it because they saw Law & Order?

I don't think it's anything to do with who watched what TV show. It might just have been a school trying to save a child from having to deal with police and other authorities. Perhaps this whole situation has been blown out of proportion by the usual suspects screaming about rights being violated when all they were trying to do was protect the child herself and the rest of the student population. Why didn't she just turn the pills over rather than needing to be strip searched?

[Alluvial]

From the article:

In the case before the court, a vice principal at an Arizona middle school in 2003 told a nurse and an aide to take student Savana Redding to an office and to search her and her underwear to see if she was hiding the pills.

She had nothing to hide, and she and her mother sued Safford school officials on grounds that they had subjected her to an "unreasonable search."

It looks as though it wasn't a case of "turn the pills over" but hearsay that she had some hidden in her underwear.

Also:

The vice principal in this case had been told that some students had pills, and that they were to be passed around at lunchtime. Based on that report, "he was entitled to search anyplace where contraband might reasonably be found," said Matthew Wright, the district's lawyer.

Justice Antonin Scalia asked if that applied to a "body-cavity search."

Wright replied that no school official would undertake such a search, but he insisted that it would be legal.

That makes me uneasy.