Supreme Court Rules Strip-Search of Middle School Student Illegal

June 26, 2009 by Suzanne Conlon

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Middle School student in Arizona was illegally strip-searched in 2003.

Savana Redding, 13, was brought into the principal’s office at Safford Middle School in October 2003 and accused of selling prescription strength ibuprofen to other students.  Redding denied the accusation and agreed to let the assistant principal of the school, Kerry Wilson, search her belongings.

When nothing was found in Redding’s backpack, Wilson instructed his administrative assistant, Helen Romero, to take the student to the nurse’s office to search her clothes for pills.

According to the court documents, “Nurse Peggy Schwallier asked Redding to remove her jacket, socks, and shoes, leaving her in stretch pants and a T-shirt (both without pockets), which she was then asked to remove.  Finally, Savana was told to pull her bra out and to the side and shake it (sic), and to pull out the elastic on her underpants, thus exposing her breasts and pelvic area to some degree.  No pills were found.”

The Court’s decision quotes a 1949 decision, Brinegar v. United States: “The Fourth Amendment ‘right of the people to be secure in their persons . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures’ generally requires a law enforcement officer to have probable cause for conducting a search.”  That case determined that a search held in a school “will be permissible in its scope when the measures adopted are reasonably related to the objectives of the search and not excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction.”

The Court concluded that “The strip search of Savana Redding was unreasonable and a violation of the Fourth Amendment, but petitioners Wilson, Romero, and Schwallier are nevertheless protected from liability through qualified immunity.”  The school district, however, was not protected by the court and is still vulnerable to lawsuit.

Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented in regards to the immunity of Wilson.  Ginsburg states that “he made [Redding] sit on a chair outside his office for over two hours.  At no point did he attempt to call her parent.  Abuse of authority of that order should not be shielded by official immunity.”  At one point during the case, Ginsburg accused her all-male colleagues on the Court of failing to understand how traumatic such a search would be for a 13-year-old girl.