User:Mz7/sandbox/Safford Unified School District v. Redding

Supreme Court
The school officials filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, which granted certiorari on January 16, 2009.

Opinion of the Court
Justice David Souter delivered the opinion of the Court, which affirmed the Ninth Circuit in part, reversed in part, and remanded. Seven justices agreed with Souter that the strip search violated Redding's Fourth Amendment rights, while five justices agreed with Souter that the individual school officials were entitled to qualified immunity because the search's unconstitutionality was not clearly established at the time of the violation.

Fourth Amendment
In his analysis of the Fourth Amendment, Souter reiterated the holding in New Jersey v. T. L. O. that the validity of school searches merely requires a standard of "reasonable suspicion", not the "probable cause" standard ordinarily used by law enforcement officers. In terms of the knowledge required to meet that threshold, this calls for only a "moderate chance" of finding the expected evidence, not at "fair probability" or "substantial chance" associated with probable cause. Souter then recounted the facts of the case, and he concluded that the school officials had conducted a "strip search", stating that "both subjective and reasonable societal expectations of personal privacy support the treatment of such a search as categorically distinct, requiring distinct elements of justification on the part of school authorities for going beyond a search of outer clothing and belongings".

Souter reiterated that in T.L.O., the Court had held that the scope of a school search "will be permissible ... when it is 'not excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction". From this, he concluded that in Redding's case, "the content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion" because assistant principal Wilson "must have been aware of the nature and limited threat of the specific drugs he was searching for", describing the drugs as "common painkillers". Additionally, Wilson could not "have suspected that Savana was hiding common painkillers in her underwear". "In sum," wrote Souter, "what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear." For these reasons, the strip search of Redding was unreasonable and violated the Fourth Amendment.

Qualified immunity
Quoting Pearson v. Callahan (2009), Souter stated that "a school official searching a student is 'entitled to qualified immunity where clearly established law does not show that the search violated the Fourth Amendment'". Although the Court explicitly held that the strip search of Redding did violate the Fourth Amendment, Souter acknowledged that "lower courts have reached divergent conclusions regarding how the T.L.O. standard applies to such searches", such as the minority of the en banc Ninth Circuit in this case, as well as the Sixth Circuit, which had previously "upheld a strip search of a high school student for a drug, without any suspicion that drugs were hidden next to her body".

Souter commented that "the cases viewing school strip searches differently from the way we see them are numerous enough, with well-reasoned majority and dissenting opinions, to counsel doubt that we were sufficiently clear in the prior statement of law". Qualified immunity is therefore warranted for the school officials in the case. Souter clarified that the Court's "conclusions here do not resolve, however, the question of the liability of petitioner Safford Unified School District #1 under Monell v. New York City Dept. of Social Servs., a claim the Ninth Circuit did not address". The Court remanded the case back to the lower courts in order for them to consider the Monell claim.

Analysis and impact
Lewis R. Katz, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and Carl J. Mazzone jointly wrote an analysis published by the Case Western Reserve Law Review, where they described the Court's decision in Redding as "a step in the right direction, clarifying T.L.O. and instructing that school strip searches are to be treated as extraordinary intrusions supported by individualized reasonable suspicion and subject to the proportionality standard". Katz and Mazzone began their analysis by stating that in the United States "an unknown number of children in primary and secondary schools are strip-searched by teachers or school administrators" and that "in some of these cases, it is not clear whether school officials are searching for contraband—usually drugs, missing money, or stolen items—or seeking to discipline, humiliate, or simply exert authority over the students". Katz and Mazzone commented that T.L.O. had "opened the floodgates for school strip searches" because "some schools and lower courts stopped considering strip searches to be different in kind or more serious intrusions than other school searches of a student's possessions".

Although they acknowledged Redding as a "step in the right direction", Katz and Mazzone stated that the Supreme Court "left unanswered some key questions regarding strip searches that will not only lead to uncertainty among both school administrators and lower courts but also guarantee future litigation", criticizing the Court for not being "clear enough to forestall future questions about what actually constitutes a strip search". They also criticized the Court's decision to grant qualified immunity to the assistant principal as "misguided", stating that "Wilson's actions defied the common sense one would expect in an experienced administrator".