The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” The amendment is meant to protect privacy and freedom from government intrusion, and generally, a search without a warrant is unconstitutional. A certain amount of probable cause is needed to secure a warrant, so if that threshold was not met, the search is usually deemed to be unreasonable. There are exceptions, however, such as when an item is in plain sight, the search happens incidental to lawful arrest (for example, you’ve been arrested for robbery, and the officers patting you down for weapons find a bag of cocaine in your pocket), or the suspect is about to escape or destroy the evidence. State laws can establish different standards, as long as they do not violate the Fourth Amendment.
The rules become a little muddied when it comes to searches in schools. Students do still have a right to privacy, but this has to be balanced with the increasing threats to school safety. States have varying standards, and there is no single definition of a reasonable search in a school. In 1985, the case New Jersey v. T.L.O went before the U.S. Supreme Court, asking whether a teacher’s report of a student smoking in the bathroom justified a search of her purse. The Court decided that “reasonable suspicion” was required for school searches. Reasonable suspicion means that the search is justified at its inception, meaning that there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will yield something. An educator can’t simply decide a student looks like trouble and check his backpack.
The search must also be reasonably related in scope to the circumstances that justified the search, meaning that the measures used to carry out the search are reasonably related to the objectives of the search and that the methods are not excessively intrusive. For example, in the case of the smoking student, it’s reasonable to assume that if you saw her smoking, she had cigarettes on her, and since she was carrying a purse, that’s probably where they were hidden. If she’d been strip-searched, that would have been a Fourth Amendment violation.
Warrantless searches are sometimes permissible if there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. For example, if you put your trash out on the curb for collection, it’s perfectly legal for anyone to go through it. Some people argue that this reasoning should be applied to school lockers because they are not actually owned by the students, and typically teachers and/or custodians will have keys or the combination to the lock.
The Court itself has said that it’s impossible to precisely definite “reasonable,” and that it’s really a matter of common sense. This, of course, leaves the question open to wildly diverging interpretations.
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