Savana Redding Heads To Supreme Court – Savana Redding heads to the Supreme Court on Tuesday to hear whether the strip search she underwent as an 8th grader was lawful.
Savana Redding is now 19, but she was strip searched at the age of 13 by school administrators when another student was found with ibuprofen and said she had gotten them from Savana.
Savana Redding has been the subject of an ACLU lawsuit against the Safford Unified School District in Safford, Arizona since 2003.
In July 2008, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a 2007 decision that the school district had not violated Savana’s constitutional rights, and held officials were not immune from her suit:
“We conclude that the school officials violated Savana’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. The strip search of Savana was neither “justified at its inception, … nor, as a grossly intrusive search of a middle school girl to locate pills with the potency of two over-the-counter Advil capsules, reasonably related in scope to the circumstances giving rise to its initiation.”
The school district appealed to the Supreme Court, saying that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling “upsets the longstanding tradition of deferring to the judgment and expertise of school officials in highly discretionary matters. The result is an opinion wholly uninformed about a disturbing new trend – teens’ abuse of prescription and over-the-counter drugs.”
Incidentally, they never found any ibuprofen in her book bag, in her clothes, or in her underwear.
Could all this have been avoided if the school administrators had simply picked up the phone that was, no doubt, a few feet away, to call her parents before performing the search?
That’s the latest news about Savana Redding Heads To Supreme Court.
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