Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/justices-rule-schools-strip-search-of-student-was-illegal Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 Thursday that officials at an Arizona school went too far when they strip searched an eighth-grader accused of distributing drugs. Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal discusses the ruling with Jim Lehrer. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: The U.S. Supreme Court issued a major decision today on the rights of students. The court said school officials in Arizona went too far when they strip-searched a teenager looking for pain pills.Here to tell us more about this lead story is Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal.Marcia, welcome. MARCIA COYLE, National Law Journal: Thank you, Jim. JIM LEHRER: First, remind us of basically what the facts were in this case. MARCIA COYLE: OK, it went like this. A male student went to the assistant principal and told him there was a plan for the students at this middle school to take some pills on campus that day, and he gave the assistant principal a white pill. And it was later discovered the pill was a prescription-strength ibuprofen pill. JIM LEHRER: Pain pill? MARCIA COYLE: Pain pill, right, exactly. The principal asked the young man, Who gave it to you?He said a female student, first name Melissa, gave it to him. The principal went, got Melissa out of class, searched her belongings, and found a blue pill, three white pills, and a razor blade. He asked her, Where did you get those?And she said she got them from Samantha Redding, who is the named person in the case today before the Supreme Court. He then went and took Samantha… JIM LEHRER: Samantha is 13 years old, right, at the time? MARCIA COYLE: Thirteen years old at the time. Now she's 19 and in college. He got Samantha out of class, brought her to his office, searched her backpack, her outer clothing, her jacket, no pills. She denied that any of this belonged to her, although it was in a student day planner that she said she had loaned to this Melissa.After finding no pills on her outer clothing and in her backpack, he asked the student nurse and an aide to take Samantha to a private room and basically strip-search her. She took off her shoes and socks, no pills. Then she was told to strip down to her bra and her underpants and to pull them away from her body so that, if there was any contraband, it would fall out. Nothing was found.They then took her to a chair outside the principal's office, where she sat for the next two hours. Parents were never contacted.