Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2009

BONUS POST: Awesome TJ tribute

I just had to. This is one womans, well, its not really an essay, but its not a pictorial, either. What it is is a clever, unique, creative and prettty powerful and interesting look at one of my fav of fav historical figures (that would TJ, Thomas Jefferson). Please take a minute or five and just read through it. I don't know the author, but it really is great. http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/time-wastes-too-fast/

Yeah - High court against blantantly illegal strip searches of 13 year olds!

The Supreme Court surprised me today and decided, 8-1, that it was a violation of the Fourth Amendment to strip search a 13-year-old girl in search of advil. Advil. The lone evidence that Savanah Redding even had the "drug" came from a fellow student who had been caught with the drugs. There was no evidence, as the court noted, that she was hiding them in her underwear. As Justice Souter said for the majority... What was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana [Redding] was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable." I really had hoped for this outcome. Though based on the oral arguments, I wasn't entirely sure it was likely. I'm mixed on the immunity for the administrators. Its a nice compromise, but really, if there isn't liabili