Miscellaneous

Alaska's Mount Redoubt erupted again last night.
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Any other decision than 9-0 in favor of Savana Redding would be an absolute civil rights outrage.

This is so egregious, there can be NO justification for it.

Schools should NEVER be permitted to conduct strip searches.

This writer has reason to worry about the USSC, however:

There are nonetheless two reasons to fear that the Supreme Court will hold otherwise. One is the fact that this case technically involves a "drug." The Supreme Court's recent school cases show the Justices to be susceptible to the same fears of drugs that politicians and the general public have expressed. Thus, in the 2007 case of Morse v. Frederick, the Court appeared to create a new exception to the First Amendment for messages "that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use." In Safford Unified the school district seeks to characterize the strip-search of Redding simply as one seeking drugs—even though Redding was at most suspected of possessing a prescription-strength ibuprofen equivalent to the dosage typically taken in over-the-counter form for a headache. Should the Justices accept the school district's characterization of the search, it could fall into the emerging "Constitution-free school zone" for drug-related cases.

Second, there is a risk that the Justices will fall into the trap of thinking that because the standard for judging the reasonableness of a search is more forgiving for school authorities than for the police, the privacy interests of schoolchildren are necessarily of lesser moment than for adults.

Granted, there may be contexts in which schoolchildren do have less of a right to privacy than adults. For example, the Supreme Court in T.L.O. itself left open the possibility that searches of student lockers might not even be subject to the requirement of reasonableness, because students lack the privacy interests in their lockers that adults have in analogous closed spaces. Yet the same cannot fairly be said about a strip search. Indeed, if anything, the strip search of a girl of thirteen—a point in life when adolescents are typically very self-conscious about their changing bodies—is more intrusive than a strip search of an adult.

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A grandstanding prosecutor wants 11-year-old Jordan Brown, who killed his father's fiancee, tried as an adult.

As if this is going to do any good. Eleven-year-old kids hardly any concept of the future at all, let alone understand the consequences of their actions.
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