Strip-searched girls can sue, court rules

May 15, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

CINCINNATI

A federal appeals panel ruled Friday that staffers at an Ohio vocational school can be sued by high-school nursing students who were strip-searched after a reported theft.

The three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected immunity for the school officials, standing by an earlier conclusion that the 2006 search was unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back last year after ruling in a similar case that school officials violated an Arizona teen’s rights in a strip search for a prescription-strength drug, but that the officials weren’t financially liable.

The Cincinnati-based appeals court said officials of the Vern Riffe Career Technology Center in Piketon, in southern Ohio, should have known the search was unreasonable for reasons including lack of individual suspects and that the issue was missing money, not health or safety.

The court said it had rejected such wide-scale searches in 2005 in a case where a school strip-searched some 25 students because of missing prom money.

“Our circuit’s clearly established law on this issue put the school and its employees on notice that this search was unconstitutional,” wrote Judge Boyce F. Martin.

The case involves 11 Piketon students who are seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars each in damages for rights violations and emotional distress.

After $60, a credit card and gift cards were reported missing, school officials had students in a nursing class empty purses and searched their lockers, according to court records.

Then, a female instructor called students one by one into a bathroom, where each was told to unhook and shake her bra and drop her pants halfway, the court records say.

The records show that the defendants said the searches weren’t done in front of other students, the students weren’t touched, and they weren’t required to remove their underwear.