Strip-searches on trial

You don’t have to be a judge to recognize that it’s outrageous to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of carrying pain medicine. The question for the U.S. Supreme Court is whether this revulsion can be translated into a legal rule that won’t turn every trip to the principal’s office into a federal case. It’s possible -- if the justices don’t succumb to anti-drug hysteria.

In 2003, Savana Redding, a student at an Arizona middle school, was taken to an assistant principal’s office after another student suggested that Savana had given her a prescription-strength ibuprofen pill. In the school nurse’s office, the eighth-grader was told to remove her clothes and to stretch out her bra and underwear. Savana called the search -- which failed to discover any pills -- “the most humiliating experience” of her life, and it’s easy to believe her.

Savana sued for damages, claiming that her 4th Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures had been violated. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, also ruling that the assistant principal wasn’t immune to lawsuits. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court considered both questions, but many of the justices seemed less concerned with legal principles than with the threat posed to schoolchildren by drugs or concealed weapons.

Role-playing as a principal, Justice David H. Souter said: “I’ve got suspicion that some drug is on this kid’s person. My thought process is: I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip-search, if we can’t find anything short of that, than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime and things go awry.” That’s a reasonable argument, but it misses an important point: If school officials have reason to believe that a student poses a danger, they need not go hunting for contraband on their own. They can and should call the police, who presumably have a better command of the laws of search and seizure.

As parents and grandparents, the justices might be tempted to defer to school officials and tolerate the occasional injustice. But as guardians of the Constitution, they need to protect the rights of students even when they are not identical to those of adults.

The court can do so by adopting the advice of the Justice Department. Although critical of the 9th Circuit’s reasoning, the solicitor general’s office proposed its own rule: No garment or part of a student’s body may be searched unless officials have reasonable suspicion that contraband is located there. That wouldn’t go as far as California law, which is even better because it prohibits all strip-searches of students by school officials. But it would protect students’ privacy rights without subjecting schools to an avalanche of lawsuits.