A jury must decide whether a Clayton County assistant principal required a seventh-grade student to strip naked during a search for marijuana, the federal appeals court in Atlanta has ruled.
If former assistant principal Tyrus McDowell made the 12-year-old student drop his underpants to his ankles in front of fellow students, as the boy contends, then McDowell conducted an unlawful search and is liable for damages, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a unanimous opinion published Friday.
“It’s a good decision,” said Atlanta lawyer Gerry Weber, who represents the student’s family. “It’s a recognition that the facts are so in our favor that the strip search was well into the range of being unconstitutional and unconscionable.”
No drugs were found on the 12-year-old.
Neither McDowell nor his lawyers could be reached for comment.
The mother of the child, identified as “D.H.” in the litigation, filed suit against McDowell and others over the Feb. 8, 2011, incident at Eddie White Academy in Hampton.
That school-day morning, according to court records, a student told school resource officer Ricky Redding that a 13-year-old seventh-grader possessed marijuana and was passing it around to other students. This led to conversations with a number of students, one of whom voluntarily produced a bag of pot hidden in his underpants’ waistband and another who was found to be hiding some marijuana in his sock.
Redding and McDowell then strip-searched another student and, while they did not find marijuana on him, a subsequent search of that student’s backpack yielded a small canister containing the drug. This student then told school officials that his classmate D.H. had marijuana as well.
Redding and McDowell had D.H. brought into Redding’s office, where the three other students were being held. Even though D.H. insisted he did not have any marijuana, they searched his backpack and then told him to strip down to his underpants, the ruling said. When McDowell then told D.H. to remove his underwear, McDowell turned down the student’s request to do so in the privacy of a restroom, court records say.
D.H. has said in pretrial testimony that he then dropped his underpants to his ankles. McDowell has said he directed the student to pull out the elastic waistband of his shorts, which still exposed the student’s genitals, the ruling said.
In its decision, the 11th Circuit ruled that a search of D.H. was reasonable given the fact that drugs had been found on the other students and D.H. had also been implicated. But if McDowell had D.H. lower his underpants in the room in front of other students instead of either removing those students or taking D.H. to a more private place, then such an action was “unconstitutionally excessive in scope,” the 11th Circuit ruling said.
However, the court said, if McDowell only asked D.H. to pull the waistband of his underpants away from his body and did not require the student to strip naked in front of the others, then McDowell cannot be held liable. The court said this is a question that should be resolved by a jury, and if a jury finds that McDowell ordered D.H. to strip naked then the only thing left to be decided is how much in damages he should pay.
In December 2013, Redding, the school resource officer who was also sued in the litigation, settled his case for $15,000, plus $52,500 in attorneys’ fees and expenses, court records say.
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