Opinion ID: 2165491
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Qualified Official Immunity

Text: Officials who are sued for monetary relief under § 1983 may assert either an absolute immunity or qualified immunity defense. The Supreme Court has generally limited absolute immunity to officials who perform judicial, prosecutorial and legislative functions, but has allowed qualified immunity to be asserted by school officials. See Wood v. Strickland, 420 U.S. 308, 95 S.Ct. 992, 43 L.Ed.2d 214 (1975). Qualified immunity protects state and local officials who carry out executive and administrative functions from personal liability so long as their actions do not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 2738, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). The Harlow objective reasonableness standard is intended to provide government officials with the ability to `reasonably anticipate when their conduct may give rise to liability for damages.' Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 647, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 3043, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987) ( quoting Davis v. Scherer, 468 U.S. 183, 195, 104 S.Ct. 3012, 3019, 82 L.Ed.2d 139 (1984)). In Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730, 122 S.Ct. 2508, 153 L.Ed.2d 666 (2002), the Supreme Court held the objective reasonableness standard requires a determination as to whether the defendant official had fair warning that his/her conduct violated federal law. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Beard found T.L.O . and Vernonia , while instructive in the area of analyzing school searches, do not offer the guidance necessary to conclude that the officials were, or should have been, on notice that the searches performed in this case were unreasonable. Beard v. Whitmore Lake School District, 402 F.3d 598, 607 (6th Cir.2005) (internal citations omitted). The court found [t]he 6th Circuit cases involving strip searches also do not clearly establish the unconstitutionality of the searches in the instant case. Id. at 607. The only precedent the Court of Appeals found regarding the constitutionality of strip searches came from the Seventh Circuit, which had held a strip search of a student in particular circumstances was not reasonable. The court, however, cited the applicable rule to follow regarding precedent, discussed in Williams v. Ellington, 936 F.2d 881, 885 (6th Cir.1991) ( quoting from Ohio Civil Service Employees Ass'n v. Seiter, 858 F.2d at 1171, 1177 (6th Cir.1988)), which says: In the rare instance where it is proper to seek guidance from outside this circuit, the law will only be clearly established where the cases outside the circuit both point unmistakably to the unconstitutionality of the conduct complained of and [are] so clearly foreshadowed by applicable direct authority as to leave no doubt in the mind of a reasonable officer that his conduct, if challenged on constitutional grounds, would be found wanting. We agree with the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that the current law, much less the law in effect when these searches occurred in 1998, did not give fair warning to the school teachers/administrators that their actions would be in clear violation of a federal statutory or constitutional right. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Beard examined the available federal precedent and the only state decision available on the issue of strip searching students is Rone v. Daviess County Bd. of Educ., 655 S.W.2d 28 (Ky.App.1983), which held there were reasonable grounds for strip searching a student to determine whether he was carrying drugs and that student was never offensively touched. This available case law could hardly be described as clearly establishing the students' rights as to warn the teachers/administrators herein their actions would be in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.