Stephanie Lovett-Bowman, Thursday, February 09, 2012 | Filed under: Fourth Amendment
A federal court sitting in Missouri recently affirmed the lawfulness of public school drug sweeps by trained drug-sniffing dogs. In its order, the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri dismissed a lawsuit filed against the Springfield Public Schools in which two high school students claimed that a drug sweep violated their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.
The students sued the school district, as well as two administrators, after the district coordinated with local law enforcement to have a trained dog sniff student possessions for illegal drugs. The court’s ruling reaffirmed United States Supreme Court precedent that such drug sweeps do not implicate Fourth Amendment rights and are entirely lawful. The court also concluded that the school district’s policy relating to such sweeps was reasonable.