Opinion ID: 853224
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Suspicion-Based Testing is Feasible

Text: One driving force in the United States Supreme Court's opinion in Vernonia was the Court's conclusion that a program based on individualized suspicion would entail substantial difficultiesif it [were] indeed practicable at all in order to handle the immediate crisis present in the Vernonia school district. As explained in Part II.C.1, NSC does not proffer evidence of a concrete danger of an immediate nature as to the students it tests. Further, as the majority points out, NSC's program not only entails random testing of the selected groups of students, but also provides that [s]tudents may also be entered into the testing program at the request of their parent ... when a student shows signs of drug use that provides reasonable suspicion to search a student. (emphasis added). By its own terms, NSC's policy purports to have the ability to determine when a reasonable suspicion is present for a given student. I recognize and agree that suspicion-based searches can lead to abuses if the grounds for suspicion are not sufficiently articulable. As noted in State v. Gerschoffer, a scheme of random searches may be less subject to abuse in the form of profiling or arbitrary enforcement than one that requires reasonable suspicion. 763 N.E.2d 960 (Ind.2002) (citing Akhil Reed Amar, Fourth Amendment First Principles, 107 Harv. L.Rev. 757, 809 (1994)). Nevertheless, the broader the net cast, and the weaker the case for any program at all, the less persuasive this consideration becomes. Thus airport searches of everyone or of randomly selected passengers may be very reasonable under current circumstances. But NSC's program subjects nearly eighty percent of its middle and high school students to random tests, based on this very tenuous claim of a concrete danger. In Willis, 158 F.3d at 421, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals stated, Under the Vernonia formulation, courts consider the feasibility of a suspicion-based search when assessing the efficacy of the government's policy. The testing program in Willis required students who were suspended for three or more days to submit to urinalysis upon their return. Willis was suspended for fighting, but refused to undergo testing upon his return. The Anderson policy, like NSC's policy, was implemented to help identify and intervene with those students who are using drugs as soon as possible and to involve the parents immediately. Id. at 417. The Seventh Circuit, holding the program violated the Fourth Amendment, found it significant that the Corporation has not demonstrated that a suspicion-based system would be unsuitable, in fact would not be highly suitable. Id. at 424-25. The court noted: As a practical matter, it may be that when a suspicion-based search is workable, the needs of the government will never be strong enough to outweigh the privacy interests of the individual. Or, stated slightly differently, perhaps if a suspicion-based search is feasible, the government will have failed to show a special need that is important enough to override the individual's acknowledged privacy interest, sufficiently vital to suppress the Fourth Amendment's normal requirement of individualized suspicion. Id. at 421 (quoting Chandler, 520 U.S. at 318, 117 S.Ct. 1295). Whether a suspicion-based system is feasible is just one factor in our totality of the circumstances analysis, but I believeas Willis illustratesit is a significant one in the balance of whether the system is reasonable. Given the fact that NSC's own policy contemplates suspicion-based testing for some students, what is practicable for some is practicable for all.