How a Frightened 13 Year Old Became a Hero of Freedom

Today on the Fourth of July we celebrate freedom from arbitrary government action. This year freedom has a new champion, a former middle school student named Savana Redding who didn’t like having her underwear searched by school officials. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the strip search violated her constitutional rights. As a result, public school students are now protected from having their most intimate areas searched on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Savanna was an unlikely person to make constitutional law. At the time, she was a 13 year old honor student with a 4.0 average who took advanced math class, was on the yearbook committee and participated in the knowledge bowl. In short, she was a nerd. However, she did have a friend named Marissa who was bad news. Marissa was implicated by another student for giving him a pill which made him sick. When Marissa was searched, she was literally covered in contraband. She had prescription strength ibuprofen and an over the counter anti-inflammatory, as well as a day planner containing knives, a permanent marker and a lighter. Marissa identified the planner as belonging to Savana and said that she had gotten the pills from her as well.

This set the stage for Savana to be searched. She admitted that the planner was hers, but didn't know anything about the contents. The initial search confirmed Savana's story that she was innocent. They looked in her backpack, but didn’t find anything. Then they had her empty out her pockets, where they didn’t find anything. Having failed to find anything, the Asst. Principal came to the only possible conclusion: that she must be hiding contraband in her underwear. The school nurse and a female administrative assistant took Savana into an office and made her take off her outer clothes and then pull out her bra and underpants. Not surprisingly, it turned out that Savana was not concealing contraband in her underwear.

After having been held for 2 1/2 hours, Savana was finally allowed to call her mother, while the school secretary sat next to her listening to every word. Savana was very embarrassed by the whole experience. Her mother got angry and demanded an explanation. At that point, the school claimed that they had had their eyes on Savana because she was part of "an unusually rowdy" group at a school dance. When her mother pointed out her exemplary record, the school officials became evasive.

When she didn't get any answers from the school, Savana's mom filed suit. The first judge to hear the case didn’t see anything wrong with the search and tossed the case out, setting the stage for a trip to the Supreme Court. Fortunately, the Supreme Court had a little more common sense. In an opinion by Justice Souter, they ruled that a generalized suspicion of possession of ibuprofen does not justify a strip search. While school officials were perfectly justified in searching Savana’s backpack and outer clothing, the invasive underwear search was unreasonable and just plain stupid (although the reserved Justice Souter did not use those precise words).

The Judge recognized that a strip search of an adolescent girl was not something to be undertaken lightly.

Savana’s subjective expectation of privacy against such a search is inherent in her account of it as embarrassing, frightening, and humiliating. The reasonableness of her expectation (required by the Fourth Amendment standard) is indicated by the consistent experiences of other young people similarly searched, whose adolescent vulnerability intensifies the patent intrusiveness of the exposure. . . . The common reaction of these adolescents simply registers the obviously different meaning of a search exposing the body from the experience of nakedness or near undress in other school circumstances. Changing for gym is getting ready for play; exposing for a search is responding to an accusation reserved for suspected wrongdoers and fairly understood as so degrading that a number of communities have decided that strip searches in schools are never reasonable and have banned them no matter what the facts may be.

Under prior Supreme Court precedent, a search is permissible when it is “not excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction.” Justice Souter reasonably held that generalized concerns that students might hide contraband in their clothing did not justify a strip search. He stated:

But when the categorically extreme intrusiveness of a search down to the body of an adolescent requires some justification in suspected facts, general background possibilities fall short; a reasonable search that extensive calls for suspicion that it will pay off. But nondangerous school contraband does not raise the specter of stashes in intimate places, and there is no evidence in the record of any general practice among Safford Middle School students of hiding that sort of thing in underwear; neither Jordan nor Marissa suggested to Wilson that Savana was doing that, and the preceding search of Marissa that Wilson ordered yielded nothing. Wilson never even determined when Marissa had received the pills from Savana;
if it had been a few days before, that would weigh heavily against any reasonable conclusion that Savana presently had the pills on her person, much less in her underwear.

In sum, 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. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.

Thanks to Savana, middle school girls are now safe from unwarranted searches of their underwear by overzealous assistant principals. The only question is why it took a trip to the Supreme Court to point out the obvious.

Post-script: Savana was kind enough to respond to a message and provide me with some more details from her experience. As a result, I have revised this article from the original version. What makes this all the more shocking to me was that Savana was a good kid who was wrongly implicated and treated like a criminal. I have a daughter who is entering 8th grade. If she was forced to endure this treatment, I would have been outraged as well.