Searching students and their possessions for drugs while they’re in school is an area of law that favors the police, to be sure. That’s because the Supreme Court said courts must weigh the Fourth Amendment rights of students, which protect them from unreasonable searches and seizures, against the rights of the school to maintain an environment in which learning can occur. The word “unreasonable” sometimes takes on a new meaning in that context, governed by the case known as New Jersey v T.L.O. (1985). The Court ruled that schools have a “legitimate need to maintain an environment in which learning can take place.”
Later, in the case known as Bd. of Educ. of Indep. Sch. Dist. No. 92 of Pottawatomie Cnty. v Earls (2002), the Supreme Court created a three-part test for determining whether a drug search of students who participated in extracurricular activities was constitutional, even without a warrant or suspicion that any of the searched students had any drugs in their possession. In deciding such cases, courts had to examine the following factors:
- the nature of the privacy interest allegedly compromised
- the character of the intrusion imposed
- the nature and immediacy of the government’s concerns and the efficacy of the policy in meeting them
Now comes a high school freshman in Missouri, whose science classroom was singled out for sniffing by police dogs that were specially trained to detect drugs. The student, known as CM in court filings, and his classmates were asked to leave their possessions in the classroom and go out into the hallway while police dogs came into the room and sniffed around.
The US district court ruled that this type of search was not unreasonable, even though it came up empty and no one at the school suspected any student in the class of carrying drugs of any kind. The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed, here.
But even though the search was found to be legal, CM’s attorneys are now wondering whether his backpack was “seized” in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, even though the school (and police) were entitled to “search” his backpack. They would like the Supreme Court to grant an appeal to hear arguments about the separation of CM from his backpack, according to a report in the News-Leader, here.
“I was shocked whenever the officers actually did come and they said we needed to go out in the hallway and we had to leave our stuff here,” the paper quoted CM as saying. “It just raised a bunch of questions to me, like why are they searching my stuff? Who gave them the right to search my stuff? What jurisdiction did they have?”
Well, the Supreme Court may have already answered this question. One circuit judge, in a concurring opinion in the Eighth Circuit case, defined a seizure as occurring “when there is some meaningful interference with an individual’s possessory interests in” a piece of property, here a backpack. He was quoting the Supreme Court case known as United States v Jacobsen, decided in 1984, and the question hinges on the word “meaningful.”
The Eighth Circuit found that the interference was “at most, an inconsequential interference.” It seems, to me, that the Supreme Court will not grant an appeal in this case, seeing as how it has already laid down the law. The seizure cannot result in a “meaningful” interference with a person’s possession of his property. You may have a different opinion as to whether the separation in CM’s case was inconsequential, as the Eighth Circuit ruled, but there is no question the justices examined the same exact question the Supreme Court said they should consider.
