Posted on 11/10/2001 3:58:31 AM PST by CFW
Clayton $26 strip search appealed to Supreme Court
Clayton County parents who want school officials found liable for conducting an intrusive strip search over $26 have now taken their case to the highest court in the land.
In a petition filed Friday, the parents asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate their federal lawsuit against Clayton school officials, the school system and the county.
"They just want to make sure it doesn't happen again," said the parents' lawyer, Gerry Weber, of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The strip search occurred Oct. 31, 1996, at West Clayton Elementary School after $26 from student candy sales turned up missing.
According to the lawsuit, a former Clayton police officer, at school that day for a drug awareness program, dropped his pants and underwear to show male students how to strip for the search in a bathroom. He threatened to take them to the police station if they refused. A teacher, Tracy Morgan, struggled with female students during an invasive search, the suit said. The money was never recovered.
The 13 parents are appealing an Aug. 15 decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta that dismissed all claims.
The court said it had "little trouble in concluding . . . that the strip searches in this case were unconstitutional." The ruling, written by Senior Judge Emmett Cox, said that an alleged theft of $26 "does not present such an extreme threat to school discipline or safety that children may be subject to intrusive strip searches without individualized suspicion."
But Cox held that the defendants were shielded under the legal doctrine of qualified immunity. Qualified immunity protects government officials from liability, unless they violate clearly established laws or rights a "reasonable" person should have known.
In this case, Cox wrote, if Clayton school officials had consulted prior court rulings for legal guidance on the issue before conducting the strip search, the best they could have discovered was that "a court may later determine that the searches were unreasonable," Cox wrote. This is not enough to make them liable, Cox said.
Weber, legal director of the ACLU's Atlanta office, said the 11th Circuit ruling is at odds with decisions by other circuit courts and with the U.S. Supreme Court's own precedents.
"It doesn't take a constitutional scholar to know that school officials can't drop their own pants and strip-search kids to recover the grand sum of $26," he said.
But Gary Sams, a lawyer for the Clayton school system, said the 11th Circuit was correct in its ruling issued last August. "The search now is deemed unconstitutional, but at the time there were no guidelines governing such a search," he said. "We'll certainly file a motion in opposition."
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I think dropping your pants and underwear in front of minor children is know as "flashing". The guy needs to be charged under the sex offender law.
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