RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES – STUDENT STRIP SEARCH ILLEGAL

 

By Robert Barnes

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, June 26, 20

Clarence Thomas: Perverted Justice

 

By Rhapee Kanasta

Ass. Press  Staff Writer

Friday, June 26, 2009 

 

In a case that had drawn attention from educators, parents and civil libertarians across the country, the United States Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that it was illegal for school administrators to strip search a 13 year old girl because they were concerned the girl was hiding drugs in her underwear.

 Justice David H. Souter, writing perhaps his final opinion for the court, said that the school administrators’ “hunch” Savana Redding, now a 19-year-old college student, had drugs in her underwear was not proper justification for seven adult male administrators to take Redding into a secluded room and conduct a strip search against her will.

 What was missing, Souter wrote, “was a reasonable belief based on reliable evidence to indicate that Savana was hiding illegal drugs or other contraband in her underwear.”

 It was reasonable to search the girl’s backpack and outer clothes, but Safford Middle School administrators made a “quantum leap” in taking the next step, the opinion said. “The meaning of such a search, and the degradation its subject may reasonably feel, render a search that intrusive wholly illegal,” Souter wrote.

 Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter. “I don’t think those school administrators went far enough,” he wrote. “The record shows that the alleged “victim” was highly attractive and that the administrators’ initial examination, documented photographically, revealed that she was wearing exciting, provocative underwear that only a girl asking for it would wear.  Consequently, in lieu, i.e., to wit, e.g., that pretty little thing could have been hiding any number of objects in places – which I cannot name because I am a gentleman – but rhyme with ‘angina’ and “heinous.’ You would be amazed what kind of things can be hidden in those places. I’ve seen pictures and videos that prove it. I saw Traci Lords do this thing in this movie with a bowling pin that was unbelievable.  I mean, unbelievable. What the majority fails to mention is that Traci Lords made those moves when she was 16 which, in my view, provides middle aged male authority figures the authority to use their authority to pull the pretty ones aside, sequester them in a reasonably sound-proof location, and check to make sure they aren’t hiding anything,” Thomas wrote.

 In 1991, during the U.S. Senate hearings on his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Anita Hill – Thomas’s former co-worker – accused Thomas of sexually harassing her by describing in detail the pornographic movies he enjoyed viewing.

Thomas denied these accusations. His nomination was confirmed and he currently sits on the United States Supreme Court, where he has a strong record of supporting the First Amendment rights of pornographers.

 

 

Traci Lords' High School Yearbook picture