Accidental Blogger

I don't believe anyone here at Accidental Blogger has yet mentioned the strip-search case currently pending at the U.S. Supreme Court.  A school strip searched a 13 year old girl; the legal question is whether that violated her constitutional rights, which disturbingly is not an easy question.  One of her classmates had gotten caught taking a pill at school, and said she got the pill from her.  The school had a zero tolerance policy or something.

Here's the most shocking aspect of this to me: the strip search was conducted because of the suspicion that the girl had provided another student with prescription-strength ibuprofen.  That's a double dose of Advil!  Forget the constitutional-law aspect of this — what type of school administrator orders a strip search in order to catch a girl with ibuprofen?

Second most shocking aspect of this: at oral arguments, the lawyer for the school district told Justice Scalia that yes, the Constitution would allow even a body-cavity search. Not that anyone would ever do that. But Scalia's not allowed to stop them.

UPDATE: Apparently, at oral arguments Justice Breyer raised the point that people stuck things in his underwear when he was in school.

“So what am I supposed to do? In my experience when I
was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once
a day, we changed for gym, okay? And in my experience, too, people did
sometimes stick things in my underwear.”

He stopped in his tracks as the entire courtroom dissolved into laughter. Then he attempted to dig himself out:

“Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don’t know.”

Which explains why the vice principal would think a strip search was appropriate? I'm not really sure where he was going with this one.