CLEORIA THOMPSON v CARTHAGE SCHOOL
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No. 95-2276
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Cleoria Thompson, as next *
friend of Ramone Lea, a minor, *
*
*
Plaintiff - Appellee, *
*
v. *
*
Carthage School District; *
Randy King, individually and in * Appeal from the United States
his capacity as Superintendent * District Court for the
of Schools; Randy Harris, Bruce * Eastern District of Arkansas.
McCracken, Curtis Rushing, Gail *
Toney, individually and in *
their official capacity as *
Members of the Board of *
Education; Norma Bartel, Ralph *
Malone, individually and in *
their capacity as employees of *
the Carthage School District, *
*
Defendants - Appellants. *
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Submitted: January 11, 1996
Filed: June 28, 1996
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Before LOKEN, REAVLEY,(*) and HANSEN, Circuit Judges.
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LOKEN, Circuit Judge.
Ramone Lea was expelled from Carthage High School after
school officials found crack cocaine in his coat pocket while
looking for guns and knives reported to be on school grounds. The
district court awarded $10,000 in SS 1983 damages for "wrongful
expulsion" because the search had violated Lea's Fourth Amendment
rights. The Carthage School District, four members of its Board of
Education, the school Superintendent, and the educators who
performed the search appeal. Concluding that the Fourth Amendment
exclusionary rule does not apply to school disciplinary hearings,
and that the search was constitutionally reasonable, we reverse.
I.
Carthage is a small, rural school district in which all grades
are housed at one location. Total enrollment is about 225; 90 to
100 students attend the High School. On the morning of October 26,
1993, a school bus driver told Norma Bartel, the High School
principal, that there were fresh cuts on seats of her bus.
Concerned that a knife or other cutting weapon was on the school
grounds, Bartel concluded that all male students in grades six to
twelve should be searched. After the search began, students told
Bartel that there was a gun at the school that morning.
Bartel and science teacher Ralph Malone conducted the search
by bringing each class of students to Malone's classroom. The
students were told to remove their jackets, shoes, and socks, empty
their pockets, and place these items on large tables in the science
room. Bartel and Malone then checked the students for concealed
weapons with a metal detector. Malone would pat down a student if
the metal detector sounded, as it often did because of the metal
brads on the students' blue jeans. Malone and Bartel also patted
the students' coats and removed any objects they could feel in the
coat pockets. They completed the search before Superintendent
Randy King arrived at 9:30 that morning.
Lea was a ninth grade student at the time of the search.
Neither Bartel nor Malone had reason to suspect that Lea had cut
the school bus seats or had brought a weapon to school that
morning. Lea's class was one of the last to be searched in the
science room. Malone searched Lea's coat pocket and found a used
book of matches, a match box, and a cigarette package. Considering
these items to be contraband, Malone showed them to Bartel, and she
brought them to her office. Bartel found only cereal in the
cigarette package but discovered "a white substance" in the match
box. She took the match box to King, who turned it over to a
deputy sheriff. A test revealed that the white substance was crack
cocaine. After a hearing, Lea was expelled for the remainder of
the school year.
Lea and his guardian, Cleoria Thompson, commenced this SS 1983
action, alleging that the search and expulsion violated Lea's
Fourth Amendment rights, and that the expulsion hearing denied him
due process. The parties submitted the case on depositions and
affidavits. The district court held that the expulsion proceeding
comported with due process, but that Lea's expulsion was wrongful
because the search had violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The
school officials had no "individualized, particularized suspicion"
that Lea was carrying a weapon or other contraband, and "there was
no adequate basis in the evidence to justify the initial decision
to search all 6-12 grade boys." In addition, the court reasoned,
Bartel and Malone seized the match box after they knew that Lea did
not possess a knife or gun. The court awarded Lea $10,000 in
compensatory damages against defendants Bartel, Malone, King, and
the school board members who voted for expulsion. It awarded Lea
a reasonable attorney's fee, granted a declaratory judgment that
his Fourth Amendment rights were violated, but declined to issue an
injunction. This appeal followed.
II.
At the outset, we confront an issue ignored by the parties and
the district court -- whether the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary
rule applies in school disciplinary proceedings. At oral argument,
we invited counsel to submit supplemental briefs addressing this
issue, but neither side did so. The issue is critical because the
district court awarded substantial damages for wrongful expulsion,
based entirely on the proposition that Lea could not be expelled
for possessing crack cocaine discovered during an illegal search.
The judicially-created exclusionary rule precludes admission
of unlawfully seized evidence in criminal trials. "In the complex
and turbulent history of the rule, the Court never has applied it
to exclude evidence from a civil proceeding, federal or state."
United States v. Janis,
428 U.S. 433, 447
(1976). In Janis, the
Court held that the rule does not apply in federal tax proceedings
to bar evidence illegally seized by state officials. In INS v.
Lopez-Mendoza,
468 U.S. 1032
(1984), the Court held that the rule
does not apply in civil INS deportation hearings. The Court's
"framework" for deciding whether the exclusionary rule applies in
a particular civil proceeding is to analyze whether the likely
benefit of excluding illegally obtained evidence outweighs the
societal costs of exclusion. Id. at 1041.
The societal costs of applying the rule in school disciplinary
proceedings are very high. For example, the exclusionary rule
might bar a high school from expelling a student who confessed to
killing a classmate on campus if his confession was not preceded by
Miranda warnings. We doubt that any parent would compromise school
safety in this fashion. To the extent the exclusionary rule
prevents the disciplining of students who disrupt education or
endanger other students, it frustrates the critical governmental
function of educating and protecting children.
Moreover, "maintaining security and order in the schools
requires a certain degree of flexibility in school disciplinary
procedures." New Jersey v. T.L.O.,
469 U.S. 325, 340
(1985).
Application of the exclusionary rule would require suppression
hearing-like inquiries inconsistent with the demands of school
discipline, demands that led the Court to impose very limited due
process requirements in Goss v. Lopez,
419 U.S. 565, 583-84
(1975).
The benefit of the exclusionary rule depends upon whether it
would effectively deter Fourth Amendment violations. In that
regard, this case is like Lopez-Mendoza in one important respect --
school officials both conducted the search and imposed the student
discipline. Knowing that evidence they illegally seize will be
excluded at any subsequent disciplinary proceeding would likely
have a strong deterrent effect. See
468 U.S. at 1042
-43.
But there are also important differences between school
discipline and the deportation proceeding at issue in Lopez-
Mendoza. The dissenters in that case argued for the exclusionary
rule "[b]ecause INS agents are law enforcement officials whose
mission is closely analogous to that of police officers and because
civil deportation proceedings are to INS agents what criminal
trials are to police officers."
468 U.S. at 1053
(White, J.,
dissenting). School officials, on the other hand, are not law
enforcement officers. They do not have an adversarial relationship
with students. "Instead, there is a commonality of interests
between teachers and their pupils. The attitude of the typical
teacher is one of personal responsibility for the student's welfare
as well as for his education." T.L.O.,
469 U.S. at 350
(Powell,
J., concurring). Moreover, children's legitimate expectations of
privacy are somewhat limited at school. Therefore, while the
Fourth Amendment applies to searches by school officials, its
reasonableness standard, when applied to school searches, "stops
short of probable cause." T.L.O.,
469 U.S. at 341
.
In these circumstances, we conclude that there is little need
for the exclusionary rule's likely deterrent effect. Indeed, we
see some risk that application of the rule would deter educators
from undertaking disciplinary proceedings that are needed to keep
the schools safe and to control student misbehavior. In any event,
any deterrence benefit would not begin to outweigh the high
societal costs of imposing the rule. Therefore, like most district
courts that have published opinions applying Janis and Lopez-
Mendoza,(1) we conclude that the exclusionary rule may not be applied
to prevent school officials from disciplining students based upon
the fruits of a search conducted on school grounds. Accordingly,
Lea was not wrongfully expelled, and the $10,000 damage award must
be reversed.(2)
III.
In concluding that the search violated Lea's Fourth Amendment
rights, the district court emphasized the fact that Bartel and
Malone had no individualized reason to suspect Lea of carrying a
weapon. In T.L.O.,
469 U.S. at 342
n.8, the Supreme Court had left
open the issue whether individualized suspicion is always required
for school searches. However, after the district court decided
this case, the Supreme Court upheld random drug testing of high
school athletes despite the absence of individualized suspicion in
Vernonia Sch. Dist. 47J v. Acton, 115 S. Ct. 2386 (1995). The
Court clarified that individualized suspicion is not always
required for school searches. It recognized that the drug testing
at issue was inherently intrusive. (Taking a urine sample and
requiring disclosure of health information is more intrusive than,
for example, looking in a purse, the search at issue in T.L.O.)
But the Court concluded that this significant privacy invasion was
justified by the important government interest in reducing drug
abuse by student athletes. 115 S. Ct. at 2396.
Vernonia impacts this case in one significant way -- it
confirms that the doctrine of qualified immunity bars any award of
damages. The individual defendants did not violate clearly
established law when they decided to search all the older male
students for dangerous weapons reported to be on the school
grounds. See Anderson v. Creighton,
483 U.S. 635, 639-40
(1987).
The district court rejected Lea's due process claim and denied
him injunctive relief. With a damage award now foreclosed by
Vernonia and our decision that there was no wrongful expulsion, the
award of an attorney's fee must also be reversed. See Farrar v.
Hobby, 113 S. Ct. 566, 575 (1992). That ends the case, except for
a difficult issue that has little remaining practical significance
-- whether the district court erred in declaring that the search
violated Lea's Fourth Amendment rights.
The Fourth Amendment inquiry in school search cases is whether
the search was reasonable in all the circumstances. The inquiry
focuses on whether the search was justified at its inception,
whether its scope was reasonably related to the circumstances
justifying a search, and the extent of the privacy intrusion. See
T.L.O.,
469 U.S. at 341
. In a school setting, "the relevant
question is whether the search is one that a reasonable guardian
and tutor might undertake." Vernonia, 115 S. Ct. at 2397. We
review the reasonableness issue de novo. See United States v.
Brown, 51 F.3d 131, 132 (8th Cir. 1995).
The district court concluded that the broad search for knives
and guns was not justified at its inception because the Carthage
School District was not facing a "serious, on-going, problem with
such dangerous instrumentalities." In our view, that analysis is
inconsistent with Vernonia. Principal Bartel had two independent
reasons to suspect that one or more weapons had been brought to
school that morning. Though she had no basis for suspecting any
particular student, this was a risk to student safety and school
discipline that no "reasonable guardian and tutor" could ignore.
Bartel's response was to issue a sweeping, but minimally intrusive
command, "Children, take off your shoes and socks and empty your
pockets." We conclude that Bartel's decision to undertake this
generalized but minimally intrusive search for dangerous weapons
was constitutionally reasonable. See Cornfield v. Consolidated
High Sch. Dist. No. 230, 991 F.2d 1316, 1320-21 (7th Cir. 1993).
The district court further concluded that the scope of the
search was not reasonably related to its original purpose because
Lea's pockets were searched after the metal detector had revealed
that he did not possess a gun or knife. But in a school setting,
Fourth Amendment reasonableness does not turn on "hairsplitting
argumentation." T.L.O.,
469 U.S. at 346
n.12. If Lea had emptied
his own coat pocket, the cigarette package and match box would have
become contraband in plain view. It is not constitutionally
significant that teacher Malone emptied the pocket after Lea put
his jacket on the table. Moreover, once Bartel and Malone
reasonably decided to quickly search many children's pockets for
dangerous weapons, it is not realistic to require them to abort the
search of a particular child who does not appear to be in
possession of such contraband.
To summarize, while we share the district court's concern over
excessive use of sweeping searches of school children's persons and
belongings, even in a minimally intrusive manner, we conclude that
the search undertaken in this case passes muster under T.L.O. and
Vernonia. The judgment of the district court is reversed and the
case is remanded for entry of judgment in favor of defendants.
A true copy.
Attest:
CLERK, U. S. COURT OF APPEALS, EIGHTH CIRCUIT.
**FOOTNOTES**
(*)
The HONORABLE THOMAS M. REAVLEY, United States Circuit Judge
for the Fifth Circuit, sitting by designation.
(1)
See James v. Unified Sch. Dist. No. 512, 899 F. Supp. 530,
533-34 (D. Kan. 1995); Morale v. Grigel, 422 F. Supp. 988, 999-1001
(D.N.H. 1976); Ekelund v. Secretary of Commerce, 418 F. Supp. 102,
106 (E.D.N.Y. 1976). Contra, Jones v. Latexo Indep. Sch. Dist.,
499 F. Supp. 223, 238-39 (E.D. Tex. 1980).
(2)
Like the Supreme Court in T.L.O., we do not consider whether
evidence illegally seized by school officials on school grounds is
admissible at a subsequent criminal trial or delinquency
proceeding. See
469 U.S. at 333
n.3.