The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 (6-25-09) that Arizona school officials violated a 13-year-old eighth grade girl’s constitutional rights when she was strip searched by a school nurse.

Savana Redding, now 19, was a student at Safford Middle School when the incident occurred. Vice Principal Kerry Wilson suspected that Redding was concealing  prescription-strength ibuprofen in her underwear, based on information he had received from another student.

After a search of her backpack and outer clothes turned up nothing, Wilson had a school nurse take Redding to her office, where she was made to remove her clothes, shake out her bra and pull her underwear away from her body, “thus exposing her breasts and pelvic area to some degree,” Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter wrote.

Nothing was found. Savana was so humiliated by the incident that she transferred to another school. Her mother filed suit against the school district, as well as against Wilson.

Savana, an honor student with no disciplinary problems, was never asked if she had pills before she was searched. The school district did not contest that Ms. Redding had no disciplinary record, but said that was irrelevant.

“Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules,” the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, “only that she was never caught.”

The district also claimed that the search was “not excessively intrusive in light of Redding’s age and sex and the nature of her suspected infraction.”

According to ACLU national legal director, Steven R. Shapiro, “Neither the Constitution nor common sense permits school officials to treat a strip search the same as a locker or backpack search. Today’s ruling eliminates any confusion that school officials may have had about this seemingly obvious point.”

“I have long believed that it does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude.” Justice John Paul Stevens

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/us/24savana.html