Reps. Barney Frank and Anthony Wiener are apparently trying to become living lessons in not learning from past mistakes.
This is a pretty terrible idea. The inspector general system is flawed, but it has exposed government malfeasance and produced some results over the years, particularly within the Justice Department. I’m all for getting rid of federal government jobs, but let’s not start with one of the few positions that holds government accountable.
Bob Herbert goes after Obama for his foot-dragging on civil liberties. More of this, please.
Supreme Court rules 8-1 against school in the Advil strip search case. But it’s not much of a victory. The opinion said the strip may have been valid had officials been looking for illegal drugs, and the individual officials who performed the illegal search can’t be held liable.
Woman dies in Houston jail while serving a two-and-a-half week sentence for marijuana possession. Score one for the drug war.
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on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 12:58 pm by Radley Balko
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TheAgitator.com
The supreme court ruling was only a victory in that they didn’t rule the search legal. The responsible individuals can’t be held liable, but can the school district be sued? If not the ruling doesn’t really have any teeth.
Franks and weiners, there’s a joke in there but I won’t go there….
Like incontinent dogs, they keep making messes on the floor.
They said it’s for the lower courts to decide if the school district can be sued.
Still a bad ruling, could have been worse, but bad enough.
AHAH! People DO die from the effects of marijuana use!
/snark
Yeah, I wasn’t happy with it after reading it. While it sounds like they strip searches were illegal, they didn’t. They said that *this* strip search was illegal. The logical converse of course, being that strip searches are legal. And while this is only half trolling, is anybody really surprised that Mr. “Long Dong Silver” was the only in favor of strip searching teenagers?
And as usual, Ginsburg and JPS are the only ones who find strip searching of teens at any time by school officials to be more than a little hinky. Great language from Ginsburg in her dissent.
And the district still gets off the hook, with a finding of qualified immunity–yes it was remanded, but it was remanded with a “we’re remanding but this is how you have to decide” order. So, yeah, the case is over. Oh, and my prediction back in April which I said was 2nd most likely to happen:
Schools have a right to strip search, but a concurrence from Kennedy and Souter(+ or – Breyer) will say that it was unreasonable in this case, and they will lay out why they think it is so and establish rules, oh, but the District has immunity, so the case is thrown out anyways.
I guess I was wrong about the concurrences.
I agree with Ginsburg.
Bleh, just typing that made me feel dirty. She’s still right, tho.
Salvo —
You’re not quite right about the qualified immunity. The three individuals who ordered/performed the search are off the hook, but the school district is not, yet.
As it says on page 13 “Our conclusions here do not resolve, however, the question of the liability of petitioner Safford Unified School District #1″. They remanded for full consideration of that claim by the courts below…
Any bets that the outcome of this ruling will simply be that zero-tolerance (and zero-brained) administrators will now just add the line “we had reasonable suspicion that the student was in possession of illegal drugs” to their report templates?
Anyone?
Anyone?
#8: Right you are, though by giving qualified immunity to the individuals, they’ve basically sent a script down to the lower courts for how to decide. Any lawyer worth his salt would argue that if the individuals have QI, so does the group that employed them. I don’t really see how they’d decide differently.
Add that to the fact that organizations have one more defense than individuals have (the “they were rogue actors” defense), and I still maintain that the case is essentially over and the girl isn’t going to get a dime, and the district will be able to say, “oops, our bad”, and get away with what I feel is, essentially, molestation.
Can the inspector general investigate Barney Frank and get his ass thrown in prison?
So the girl’s rights were violated, but nobody violated them. Yeah, that sounds like the kind of decision we’ve come to expect from the SC.
I thought it was already well established that kids (especially when they happen to be in school) have no rights.
I guess they have at least one now. The right to have the report written justifying their humiliation and molestation at the whim of school officials contain words referring to substances deemed to be really really bad.
Did anyone really think that the supreme court would completely tie the hands of our state-run schools? Or inhibit “progress” in the war on drugs?
We can’t have these kids running around thinking they have rights or something. After all, when they reach adulthood, it may shock them to find out that they really don’t.
Regarding the strip search ruling: This is very disappointing, but I am confused on one point. If SCOTUS says the principal can’t be sued because there was no clearly established ruling on the Fourth Amendment application to this sort of case. But, going forward, now that the ruling has been made, school official should be able to be sued, right? I haven’t read the ruling itself, but it seems that would be an implication.
BTW, the NYT article seems to take a pro-school attitude here:
Yeah, I’m sure all the strip-searching pervs are breathing a sigh of relief that they won’t be sued for pursuing their noble quest of keeping the school safe from ibuprofen. Please, NYT, give it a rest.
Also, when Souter waxes on about a “school official with responsibility for safety”, I wonder what he means by “responsibility”? Apparently, the school official in question didn’t think that his responsibility included keeping kids safe from being molested over Advil. But, if a kid gets hurt by having Advil (or illegal drugs), can the school officials actually be held legally responsible? In other words, can a parent (or anyone) have a principal fired or charged with a crime if there was a rumor that little Sally has a baggy full of X stuffed up her butt and he doesn’t give her the rubber glove treatment? Because, if he can’t legally be fired or prosecuted for it, then how is he legally responsible? Or was that term just meaningless pablum on Souter’s part?
A 29 year old girl* die alone in a fucked up jail over marijuan possession. I hope all of the asshole drug warriors are fucking proud of themselves over this shining example of deterrence.
Fuck, fuck and fucking fuck! Crap like this infuriates me so much I can barely get into a discussion with a prohibitionist without foaming at the mouth and spouting obscenities.
* Yeah, girl. I’m in my 50s, I can get away with that.
Actually, I’m convinced that either by coincidence or by design, the public school system is a effective tool for convincing adults that they actually do have rights. In school, the rights you think you have are violated regularly and egregiously. Once you finish school, the rights you think you have are violated less often and much more subtly (most of the time, anyways).
They start you in a small cage, then move you to a bigger cage and let you think you’re free.
“The opinion said the strip may have been valid had officials been looking for illegal drugs, and the individual officials who performed the illegal search can’t be held liable.”
The Prerogative of the State
Any agent of the State acting in official capacity (and even off-duty in certain cases) and not for personal gain will be defended and exonerated by the State.
Charles Johnson (RadGeek) has a clearinghouse of such stories to add to Balko’s collection here. Additionally, there seems to be a movement afoot to include an exemption for acting for personal gain in some of these stories.
http://www.radgeek.com
It is clear that there is no justice within the system for the un-uniformed among us. A war is brewing.
From the strip search case:
“Parents are known to overreact to protect their children from danger, and a school official with responsibility for safety may tend to do the same,” Justice Souter wrote.
Which I’m sure means that when I “overreact” by taking a baseball bat to any school administrator who “protects” my kids in that fashion, I will likewise suffer no negative consequences.
Mr. Herbert is not on my list of favorite columnists. Far from it. He’s gotten this one right though. I try to give credit where it’s due.
The way I read Thoma’s dissenting opinon, he believes stripping children is a way to enforce discipline.
Tardy? Chewing gum? Throwing paper airplanes? Nude ogling by the principals and other officials. Probably recorded, too.
From the woman dies in prison article:
‘The findings, addressed to Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, lauded the prison’s efforts to maintain security, booking and intake programs and take basic fire safety precautions. The Justice Department said that by these measures, the facility “complies with constitutional requirements in a number of significant respects.”’
So… does this suggest that it DOESN’T comply with constitutional requirements in some respects, some of which may or may not be “significant”?
Tell me it ain’t true! That Bob Herbert commentary quotes Jane Mayer as saying about the rendition program, “As many as seven detainees were misidentified and abducted by mistake.”
It was probably the overcast weather.
RIP Farrah. 1947-2009
http://bittenandbound.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/farrah-fawcett.jpg
Radley, re the IG article – I think that your comments with the link are a bit off the mark. The post clearly doesn’t seriously call for abolishment of any IG post, only for this administration to live up to the standards its party and head helped to set when they had not yet received their mantle of power.
@Bill:
That’s not an overreaction at all. Anyone who strip-searches a child of mine will become either a vegetable or a corpse, depending on how long it takes someone to intervene.
Thanks for that link. Looks like an excellent collection of stories.
Or for the informed.
You’re such an optimist.
There. You happy?
:)
Somebody get out a cluebat… The point of the Inspector General isn’t to curb spending, but any activity that is fraud, waste, abuse or corruption.
So what order of abuse of authority should be tolerated, Ms. Ginsberg? If he had left a voicemail for her parent, then immediately ordered the search, would that be a low enough order for you?
And people wonder how I can call myself a bleeding-heart libertarian.
#26, Edwin, I don’t disagree with you. I’m just glad that, apparently, my “overreaction” will be understood and tolerated by the courts and the police.
Right.
But I have thought long and hard about this since the case went to the courts, and sad to say, and in tension with my personal faith and desire to treat others mercifully, I believe that some of us parents, if confronted with such a situation, may need to risk and, probably, lose their freedom in exactly this way, so that school officials who would treat kids this way learn that they too may have to pay a high price. I don’t think killing them would be appropriate: it is not a proportionate response, in my opinion, and a live, but scarred, administrator will serve as a deterrent to future misconduct.
I would love to see this from “their” perspective, but I really can’t see anyone treating kids this way unless they are stupid or evil, and almost certainly cowardly, as evidenced either by their eagerness to mistreat children, or their inability to reject zero tolerance rules when they make no sense.
If I had a tweener or teenage daughter in the school system (or the two nieces that I do have), my advice to them should they find themselves in this situation would be to refuse the search.
If the school thugs try to force a search, kick them “between the uprights” and cry rape. QI isn’t going to protect you or your teaching license when your name is added to the sex offenders database. Learning how to walk with 3/8-inch tungsten drill bits in your knees and a Louisville Slugger broken off in your ass should be fun, too.
No time/energy to comment, but it’s not obvious that the IG firing is in any way political. Link dump from Talking Points Memo:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/06/more_on_that_ig_firing.php
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/americorps_board_member_we_initiated_ig_firing.php
That doesn’t say anything about TARP iirc.
Is the Redding case the product of compromise? It really doesn’t say much at all and fails to lay down any bright line rules for administrators to follow. Thus, the next time some school official conducts a strip search, they can continue to claim qualified immunity (unless the facts are four square with Redding) because Redding still does not make it clear what set of facts would be sufficient to allow an administrator to conduct a strip search.
It would have been easy to say, “School officials don’t get to conduct strip searches. If they feel they have a sufficient basis to strip a 13 year old down and inspect every inch of their body looking for drugs, then they must have a sufficient basis to call the police and have the police arrest the child. So they should call the police and get the arrest, or they should let the kid go.” But there clearly are enough people on the Supreme Court that quiver with fear over drugs in schools combined with enough people that think school officials should be viewed as de facto police detectives, that they weren’t willing to do that.
How on earth a school administrator, having taken a moment to think about it and perhaps call the school board’s counsel (which one wishes they would have the half wit necessary to do), would think this wasn’t beyond the bounds of reasonableness is beyond me. Since the court clearly found there was no emergency that required a strip search right now, right now, right now, then why wouldn’t they hold the administrator to that standard of reasonableness? Because they are deathly afraid of drugs in schools and because they prefer not to limit the power of the government officials that they view as police authorities.
Also interesting to see Justice Thomas continue with his line of opinions acknowledging that students have rights but that school officials can’t possibly violate them under any circumstances.
Isn’t Bob Hebert the guy who shot a kid in the ass after the kid and his girlfreind broke into his backyard and went swimming?
RE: IG limitations…
As much as I hate to admit it, I am a federal employee. Trust me, I have struggled with this since joining, and the only reason I’ve stuck it out as long as I have is that I’m working for the IG. We do have some resources to limit govt spending. I know in my career (nearly 10 years now) I have personally netted over $100M in monetary benefits. Yes, I know that this doesn’t mean that the $100M wasn’t spent by the government, but at least it wasn’t spent on the stupid items I identified that didn’t need the money (and yes, I do agree that 99% of government spending can be labeled as such).
The real problem I see with the IG system is the political control over the IGs. The position of Inspector General is a nominated position, often going to “friends” of the president who may or may not have any audit or investigative background at all. In my experience, they all seem to be lawyers. I have never been able to understand how someone beholden to the president, and to a lesser extent Congress, can be the “watchdog” on government spending. I’ve seen/heard about too many instances where reports have been watered down and/or squashed because they didn’t agree with what the pres/congress/the department wanted to hear.
I am a strong proponent of the IG system in theory. However, until the organization is independent enough to publish the reports that need to be published, they are not as effective as they should, or could, be. And from the articles, those IGs who do stand up for what is right are often viewed as troublemakers and are removed from office. What kind of message does this send?
I’m fighting the fight as much as possible, but know that I will never be in a position to effect much change from the inside (I’m a bit too outspoken on my views to rise very high in the organization hierarchy). It’s hard to balance a libertarian’s small government mindset with working for the government, but I can be happy in the fact that so far in my career I’ve stopped more spending than I have cost (I calculated it once, and I’ve been a $10:1 benefit to the government to this point), and I make a point of writing my reports from the small government viewpoint. Maybe someday some of it will start to sink in…
#22
I’m more scared that “complies with constitutional requirements in a number of significant respects” is taken as praise of the jail. Filling constitutional requirements is worthy of praise? Woah.
the only other place I know of where kids are routinely stripped searched for contraband are prisons. So that confirms the belief as a kid that being in school was like being in prison. Who would have thought it was literal.
Thomas, that guy needs therapy. He seems to have grave issues with control, especially when it comes to sexual things.
Good ole Barney Frank at it again, huh? Only in American can the congress (i.e. Clinton) force two banking industries to loosen their guidelines to allow persons who cannot afford a home to purchase one anyway, and then punish the same institutions for lending to people who they “KNEW” couldn’t repay!!! Glad they are still in charge. And you wonder why nobody wants the government to run out health care.
SEO: Sadly, many people want the government to run our health care.