Round Lake Schools Sued Over Student's Strip Search for Pot

Former Round Lake Middle School Principal Ryan Hawkins and current Assistant Principal Ray Porten, along with the rural school district, are facing a $1.2 million lawsuit over an alleged illegal strip-search of a 13-year-old student, reports the Chicago Tribune. The two administrators, along with an unknown third school employee, were acting on a tip from another student, who claimed to hear the boy and his friend state that they had marijuana.

The three administrators pulled the boy out of class and took him into a conference room, where they searched his shoes, then had him lift his shirt and pull down his pants and underwear. They also had him lift his genitals “to allow visual inspection.” The entire search took place in a conference room with uncovered windows.

Finding no weed tucked in the boy’s tuchus, the intrepid investigators then decided to search his locker and other belongings. The search still turned up nothing — except, of course, a lawsuit.

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According to the family’s attorney, school officials are required to search the boy’s belongings, outer clothing, and locker before they inspect his genitalia. They can only proceed to a strip search when contraband is found elsewhere first.

One wonders if, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling in Redding, if they even would have been allowed to search if they had gone in the proper order. In the Redding case, a 13-year-old girl was strip-searched because another student was caught with really big ibuprofen (Advil) tablets and named her as the source. The court ruled that the search violated the child’s Fourth Amendment rights and invaded her privacy:

“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.”

Was this search reasonable, in light of Redding? Not only did they fail to search the student’s locker and elsewhere before making him expose his most intimate areas to three grown men, but as far as we know, there was no specific reason to think that the boy had tucked marijuana in his underwear. Also, reasonable minds could certainly differ on whether marijuana is powerful or dangerous enough to justify such an intrusive search.

Another important note from Redding is that the administrators themselves might be liable in this case. In Redding, the individual employees were let off the hook because under previous case precedent, school officials are not individually liable unless clear settled law indicates that their actions were illegal. At that point, the issue of reasonableness of strip-searches for drugs had not been addressed by the court. Now it has. If common sense and decency didn’t tell the administrators that strip-searching a boy was a bad idea, the Court’s ruling in Redding certainly should have.

Related Resources:

• Consult a Chicago Personal Injury Attorney (FindLaw)
• Round Lake middle school officials accused of strip-searching student (Daily Herald)
• Common Sense Wins in Redding, the School Strip-Search Case (FindLaw’s Writ)
• SCOTUS Rules Strip Search of Adolescent Unconstitutional (FindLaw’s Courtside)