By Frank D. LoMonte, Executive Director, Student Press Law Center
After the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in Morse v. Frederick (the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case), it appeared that a school administrator could not conceive of anything rash or foolish enough to exceed the extra-strength forgiveness that the Court was prepared to afford to even the most irrational and thinly justified management decision.
With today's decision in Safford Unified School District v. Redding, we have finally relocated the Supreme Court's capacity for outrage - and it required searching the panties of a 13-year-old girl to find it.
On an 8-1 vote, the Court decided that officials of an Arizona middle school exceeded the Fourth Amendment when - acting on an unspecific tip of unknown reliability - they forced 13-year-old Savanna Redding to stretch out her underwear so an assistant principal could check for contraband over-the-counter pills. On the constitutional issue, Justice David Souter's opinion failed to gain only the support of Justice Clarence Thomas, consistent with Thomas' view that schoolchildren's only right is the entitlement to salutary knuckle-rappings.
The Court relied on its 1985 ruling in New Jersey v. T.L.O., which upheld the search of a high school freshman's purse based on the "reasonable suspicion" that the student, whom a teacher had just caught smoking in a school bathroom, would be carrying cigarettes. Under the T.L.O. standard, reasonable suspicion is sufficient to support school officials' search of a student on school grounds, so long as the search is both reasonably justified at its inception and conducted within a reasonable scope.