Thompson v. Carthage School Dist., 95-2276

• Decision Date: 28 June 1996
• Docket Number: No. 95-2276,95-2276
• Citation: 87 F.3d 979
• Parties: 110 Ed. Law Rep. 602 Cleoria THOMPSON, as next friend of Ramone Lea, a minor, Plaintiff--Appellee, v. CARTHAGE SCHOOL DISTRICT; Randy King, individually and in his capacity as Superintendent of Schools; Randy Harris, Bruce McCracken, Curtis Rushing, Gail Toney, individually and in their official capacity as Members of the Board of Education; Norma Bartel, Ralph Malone, individually and in their capacity as employees of the Carthage School District, Defendants--Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit

Page 979

87 F.3d 979

110 Ed. Law Rep. 602

Cleoria THOMPSON, as next friend of Ramone Lea, a minor Plaintiff--Appellee, v. CARTHAGE SCHOOL DISTRICT; Randy King, individually and in his capacity as Superintendent of Schools; Randy Harris Bruce McCracken, Curtis Rushing, Gail Toney, individually and in their official capacity as Members of the Board of Education; Norma Bartel, Ralph Malone, individually and in their capacity as employees of the Carthage School District Defendants--Appellants.

No. 95-2276.

United States Court of Appeals Eighth Circuit.

Submitted Jan. 11, 1996.

Decided June 28, 1996.

Walter Blume, Little Rock, AR, argued, for appellant.

Jack Kearney, Little Rock, AR, argued, for appellee.

Before LOKEN, REAVLEY, ^* and HANSEN, Circuit Judges.

LOKEN, Circuit Judge.

Ramone Lea was expelled from Carthage High School after school officials found crack cocaine in his coat pocket while looking for guns and knives reported to be on school grounds. The district court awarded $10,000 in § 1983 damages for "wrongful expulsion" because the search had violated Lea's Fourth Amendment rights. The Carthage School District, four members of its Board of Education, the school Superintendent, and the educators who performed the search appeal. Concluding that the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule does not apply to school disciplinary hearings, and that the search was constitutionally reasonable, we reverse.

I.

Carthage is a small, rural school district in which all grades are housed at one location. Total enrollment is about 225; 90 to 100 students attend the High School. On the morning of October 26, 1993, a school bus driver told Norma Bartel, the High School principal, that there were fresh cuts on seats of her bus. Concerned that a knife or other cutting weapon was on the school grounds, Bartel concluded that all male students in grades six to twelve should be searched. After the search began, students told Bartel that there was a gun at the school that morning.

Bartel and science teacher Ralph Malone conducted the search by bringing each class of students to Malone's classroom. The students were told to remove their jackets, shoes, and socks, empty their pockets, and place these items on large tables in the science room. Bartel and Malone then checked the students for concealed weapons with a metal detector. Malone would pat down a student if the metal detector sounded, as it often did because of the metal brads on the students' blue jeans. Malone and Bartel also patted the students' coats and removed any objects they could feel in the coat pockets. They completed the search before Superintendent Randy King arrived at 9:30 that morning.

Lea was a ninth grade student at the time of the search. Neither Bartel nor Malone had reason to suspect that Lea had cut the school bus seats or had brought a weapon to school that morning. Lea's class was one of the last to be searched in the science room. Malone searched Lea's coat pocket and found a used book of matches, a match box, and a cigarette package. Considering these items to be contraband, Malone showed them to Bartel, and she brought them to her office. Bartel found only cereal in the cigarette package but discovered "a white substance" in the match box. She took the match box to King, who turned it over to a deputy sheriff. A test revealed that the white substance was crack cocaine. After a hearing, Lea was expelled for the remainder of the school year.

Lea and his guardian, Cleoria Thompson, commenced this § 1983 action, alleging that the search and expulsion violated Lea's Fourth Amendment rights, and that the expulsion hearing denied him due process. The parties submitted the case on depositions and affidavits. The district court held that the expulsion proceeding comported with due process, but that Lea's expulsion was wrongful because the search had violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The school officials had no "individualized, particularized suspicion" that Lea was carrying a weapon or other contraband, and "there was no adequate basis in the evidence to justify the initial decision to search all 6-12 grade boys." In addition, the court reasoned, Bartel and Malone seized the match box after they knew that Lea did not possess a knife or gun. The court awarded Lea $10,000 in compensatory damages against defendants Bartel, Malone, King, and the school board members who voted for expulsion. It awarded Lea a reasonable attorney's fee, granted a declaratory judgment that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated, but declined to issue an injunction. This appeal followed.

II.

At the outset, we confront an issue ignored by the parties and the district court--whether the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule applies in school disciplinary proceedings. At oral argument, we invited counsel to submit supplemental briefs addressing this issue, but neither side did so. The issue is critical because the district court awarded substantial damages for wrongful expulsion, based entirely on the proposition that Lea could not be expelled for possessing crack cocaine discovered during an illegal search.

The judicially-created exclusionary rule precludes admission of unlawfully seized evidence in criminal trials. "In the complex and turbulent history of the rule, the Court never has applied it to exclude evidence from a civil proceeding, federal or state." United States v. Janis, 428 U.S. 433, 447, 96 S.Ct. 3021, 3029, 49 L.Ed.2d 1046 (1976). In Janis, the Court held that the rule does not apply in federal tax proceedings to bar evidence illegally seized by state officials. In INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032, 104 S.Ct. 3479, 82 L.Ed.2d 778 (1984), the Court held that the rule does not apply in civil INS deportation hearings. The Court's "framework" for deciding whether the exclusionary rule applies in a particular civil proceeding is to analyze whether the likely benefit of excluding illegally obtained evidence outweighs the societal costs of exclusion. Id. at 1041, 104 S.Ct. at 3484-85.

The societal costs of applying the rule in school disciplinary proceedings are very high. For example, the exclusionary rule might bar a high school from expelling a student who confessed to killing a classmate on campus if his confession was not preceded by Miranda warnings. We doubt that any parent would compromise school safety in this fashion. To the extent the exclusionary rule prevents the disciplining of students who disrupt education or endanger other students, it frustrates the critical governmental function of educating and protecting children.

Moreover, "maintaining security and order in the schools requires a certain degree of flexibility in school disciplinary procedures." New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325, 340, 105 S.Ct. 733, 742, 83 L.Ed.2d 720 (1985). Application of the exclusionary rule would require suppression hearing-like inquiries inconsistent with the demands of school discipline, demands that led the Court to impose very limited due process requirements in Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565, 583-84, 95 S.Ct. 729, 740-41, 42 L.Ed.2d 725 (1975).

The benefit of the exclusionary rule depends upon whether it would effectively deter Fourth Amendment violations. In that regard, this case is like Lopez-Mendoza in one important respect--school officials both conducted the search and imposed the student discipline. Knowing that evidence they illegally seize will be excluded at any subsequent disciplinary proceeding would likely have a strong deterrent effect. See 468 U.S. at 1042-43, 104 S.Ct. at 3485-86.

But there are also important differences between school discipline and the deportation proceeding at issue in Lopez-Mendoza. The dissenters in that case argued for the exclusionary rule "[b]ecause INS agents are law enforcement officials whose mission is closely analogous to that of police officers and because civil deportation proceedings are to INS agents what criminal trials are to police officers." 468 U.S. at 1053, 104 S.Ct. at 3491 (White, J., dissenting). School officials, on the other hand, are not law enforcement officers. They do not have an adversarial relationship with students. "Instead, there is a commonality of interests between teachers and their pupils. The attitude of the typical teacher is one of personal responsibility for the student's welfare as well as for his education." T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 350, 105 S.Ct. at 747 (Powell, J., concurring). Moreover, children's legitimate expectations of privacy are somewhat limited at school. Therefore, while the Fourth Amendment applies to searches by school officials, its reasonableness standard, when applied to school searches, "stops short of probable cause." T.L.O., 469 U.S. at 341, 105 S.Ct. at 742.

In these circumstances, we conclude that there is little need for the exclusionary rule's likely deterrent effect. Indeed, we see some risk that application of the rule would deter educators from undertaking disciplinary proceedings that are needed to keep the schools safe and to control student...