Wrapping up the Strip Search for Advil Case

I thought the school would lose the case but 8-1 is a pretty strong rejection of the school's policies and behaviors.

Supreme Court Rules School's Strip Search of Girl Was Illegal
By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 25, 2009 12:22 PM

The Supreme Court ruled today that Arizona school officials violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old girl when they subjected her to a strip search on the suspicion she might be hiding ibuprofen in her underwear.

The court ruled 8-1 that such an intrusive search without the threat of a clear danger to other students violated the Constitution's protections against unreasonable search or seizure.

Justice David H. Souter, writing perhaps his final opinion for the court, said that in the search of Savana Redding, now a 19-year-old college student, school officials overreacted to vague accusations that Redding was violating school policy by possessing the ibuprofen, equivalent to two Advils.

What was missing, Souter wrote, "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," Souter wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. "Judges are not qualified to second-guess the best manner for maintaining quiet and order in the school environment," Thomas wrote.

Thomas - "Judges are not qualified to second-guess" ... Everyone else seems to think so, why not the Supreme Court?