Students Have Some Rights Too

What was supposed to be a day of celebration for several young Livonia, Mich., teens turned sour in June. An assistant principal called the police rather than parents after he wrongly concluded the students had been drinking at a school picnic. That was a mistake.

Now, the city of Livonia faces a lawsuit, filed earlier this week by the American Civil Liberties Union in federal court. The suit contends Livonia Police disregarded the rights of a 13-year-old boy and his friends when they made the young people take a breath test — without consent or a search warrant.

The students were celebrating their graduation at a school-sponsored picnic in a local Park. A few classmates headed into the woods, and when they returned, their assistant principal accused them of drinking alcohol. According to reports, he had followed them into the woods and found an empty liquor bottle on the ground.

Assuming the bottle belonged to the students, the school official confronted them; although they denied drinking alcohol, he called the police. The breath tests confirmed the teens didn't have any alcohol in their systems, the suit claims.

Dan Korobkin, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan, who is working on the case, says police can't force pedestrian minors to take a breath test — considered a search — without a warrant. The ACLU has won several similar cases in the past few years at the state and federal level, so legal precedent supports the case. Most recently, the Michigan Court of Appeals declared such searches unconstitutional.

Michigan previously was the only state to make it illegal for a pedestrian minor to refuse a breath test when police didn't have a search warrant.

Korobkin believes much is at stake in the case, including protecting the young man's constitutional rights, especially his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The ACLU would like the court to award damages and instruct police to remove the child's name and details of the incident from law enforcement records.

Removal of the name from records is reasonable. The police had no legal authority to order the breath tests, according to facts in the lawsuit. And even though the main legal problem appears to be that the police didn't have a warrant, the administrator should have called the parents first. It's hard to believe the parents would have consented to the breath tests or involving the police at all. Based on the facts available so far, the incident did not merit the presence of law enforcement.

Donald Knapp, the head of the Livonia law department, says city officers are professional and well-trained. "I would be surprised if the facts as pleaded by the ACLU are in fact completely true," he said.

In fairness, that possibility must be borne in mind. School officials should have some leeway in managing students — and minor students in a school situation do not have all the constitutional rights of adults. But students do deserve to be treated fairly. The ACLU would like the suit to raise awareness that young people have constitutional rights in these circumstances.

If the facts presented in the suit hold up, it would seem that a little common sense on the assistant principal's part could have prevented the lawsuit altogether — and not marred an otherwise happy occasion.

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