Opinion ID: 3065289
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: T.L.O. and the Fourth Amendment in Public

Text: Schools We begin by noting that, despite defendants’ heavy reliance upon it, the Supreme Court’s decision in T.L.O. is at best tangentially related to this case. T.L.O. addressed the claims of a high school student whose purse was searched by an assistant vice principal, without a warrant or probable cause, after a teacher discovered two girls smoking in the school lavatory. 469 U.S. at 328. The Court held the search reasonable even in the absence of a warrant or probable cause, explaining that the warrant requirement was “unsuited to the school environment” because it “would unduly interfere with the maintenance of the swift and informal disciplinary procedures needed in the schools.” Id. at 340. The Court similarly noted that the school setting required “some modification of the level of suspicion” needed to justify a search of students, in light of “the substantial need of teachers and administrators for freedom to maintain order in the schools.” Id. at 340-41. The Court therefore applied a special standard — “reasonableness under all the circumstances” — which “involves a twofold inquiry: first, . . . whether the action was justified at its inception; second, . . . whether the search as actually conducted was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place.” Id. at 341 (internal citation and quotation omitted). Defendants maintain that we must apply this standard across-the-board to all searches and seizures in public schools, but the language of T.L.O. itself indicates that it was not meant to be read so broadly. The Court expressly noted, for example, that it was addressing only searches “by a teacher or other school official,” explaining that “[b]y focusing attention on the question of reasonableness, the standard will spare teachers and administrators the necessity of schoolGREENE v. CAMRETA 16315 ing themselves in the niceties of probable cause and permit them to regulate their conduct according to the dictates of reason and common sense.” Id. at 341, 343. The Court further clarified that it was considering “only searches carried out by school authorities acting alone and on their own authority,” expressing “no opinion” on “the appropriate standard for assessing the legality of searches conducted by school officials in conjunction with or at the behest of law enforcement agencies.” Id. at 341 n.7. [7] The Court recently affirmed the narrowness of T.L.O., characterizing it as “h[o]ld[ing] that for searches by school officials a careful balancing of governmental and private interests” requires a showing less than probable cause, and therefore applying “a standard of reasonable suspicion to determine the legality of a school administrator’s search of a student.” Safford Unified Sch. Dist. v. Redding, 129 S.Ct. 2633, 2639 (2009) (internal citation and quotation omitted).8 See also Ferguson v. City of Charleston, 532 U.S. 67, 79 n.15 (2001) (noting that “[i]n T.L.O., [the Court] made a point of distinguishing searches ‘carried out by school authorities acting alone and on their own authority’ from those conducted ‘in conjunction with, or at the behest of law enforcement agencies’ ”). [8] S.G. was, of course, seized and interrogated by a social services caseworker and a deputy sheriff. Neither of these individuals qualifies as a “school official.” Thus, by its own terms, T.L.O. does not control our resolution of S.G.’s Fourth Amendment claim. The Second Circuit has reached the same conclusion we do, holding T.L.O. inapplicable to the seizure of a student by a social services agency caseworker. See Tenenbaum v. Williams, 193 F.3d 581, 607 (2d Cir. 1999). As the Second Circuit explained, “[p]ublic schools have a relationship with their students that is markedly different from the 8 Redding held that a strip search of a girl suspected of possessing prescription ibuprofen was unreasonable under the T.L.O. standard. 16316 GREENE v. CAMRETA relationship between most governmental agencies, including [Child Protective Services], and the children with whom they deal. Constitutional claims based on searches or seizures by public school officials relating to public school students therefore call for an analysis . . . that is different from that [for searches or seizures by caseworkers].” Id. Moreover, the Court’s decision in T.L.O. was premised on a “special need” of government not present in this case: “the substantial interest of teachers and administrators in maintaining discipline in the classroom and on school grounds.” 469 U.S. at 339. The Court noted that disciplinary problems and student drug use had been rising in recent years, and that “the preservation of order and a proper educational environment requires close supervision of schoolchildren, as well as the enforcement of rules against conduct that would be perfectly permissible if undertaken by an adult.” Id. It was in light of these considerations that the Court concluded that the school’s need swiftly to discipline T.L.O., suspected of smoking in the lavatory in violation of school rules, would be frustrated if school officials were required first to obtain a warrant based on probable cause. Id. at 340-41. In this case, by contrast, S.G. is not suspected of having violated any school rule, nor is there any evidence that her immediate seizure was necessary to “maintain[ ] discipline in the classroom and on school grounds.” Id. at 339. The “special need” animating the Court’s decision in T.L.O. is therefore entirely absent.9 See Jones v. Hunt, 410 F.3d 1221, 1228 9 For the same reason, several of the other school seizure cases relied upon by defendants are inapposite, as they also address situations in which the student was suspected of committing an infraction on school grounds or during a school activity. See, e.g., Gray ex rel. Alexander v. Bostic, 458 F.3d 1295 (11th Cir. 2006) (student verbally threatened teacher); Wofford v. Evans, 390 F.3d 318 (4th Cir. 2004) (student allegedly brought gun to school); Hassan v. Lubbock Indep. Sch. Dist., 55 F.3d 1075 (5th Cir. 1995) (student detained and removed from school field trip due to misbeGREENE v. CAMRETA 16317 (10th Cir. 2005) (holding the T.L.O. standard inapplicable to the seizure of a student that did “not involve efforts by school administrators to preserve order on school property”). [9] These distinctions are crucial if we are properly to assess the Fourth Amendment standard applicable to the seizure of an alleged victim of child sexual abuse at her school. “Although the underlying command of the Fourth Amendment is always that searches and seizures be reasonable, what is reasonable depends on the context within which a search takes place.” T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 337. For each “specific class of searches,” we determine the appropriate standard of reasonableness by “ ‘balancing the need to search against the invasion which the search entails.’ ” Id. (quoting Camara v. Mun. Court, 387 U.S. 523, 536-37 (1967)). If the seizure of a student at school to investigate sexual abuse by a parent could be said to belong to the same “specific class of searches” as the search of a student’s purse to investigate a disciplinary infraction, we would be justified in applying the reasonableness standard outlined in T.L.O. to the facts of this case. But T.L.O. itself indicates that the two types of searches differ in critical ways. We therefore cannot rely on the balancing of interests in T.L.O. to assess the reasonableness of defendants’ decision to seize S.G.