Today’s Supreme Court news:
All well and good. So, who was the lone dissenter, and on what grounds…?
Er… what? A suspicion does not dissipate merely because investigation turns up no supporting evidence for it? The logical response when one fails to find what one expects is to conclude that a coverup is afoot and to dig deeper? How is this different from the “logic” of 9-11 Truthers, UFO cultists, and other conspiracy crackpots?
Hey, it worked for Ken Starr.
I’m sure he agrees that the fact that Obama could so readily produce a birth certificate only shows the depth of the fraud being perpetrated on the American people.
Makes sense to me:
You have a suspicion that someone is hiding Object A. If so, it can be in location X, Y, or Z. The fact that you’ve shown it isn’t in location X doesn’t really do anything to diminish the suspicion that the Object is being hidden. In fact, if the suspicion is reasonable then it increases the likelihood that it is one of the unsearched locations.
When I lose my TV remote control in my living room, I don’t stop looking just because it wasn’t under the couch saying “oh well, I’ve found no evidence it is in the living room.”
Seems kind of like the Monty Hall problem. Learning that nothing was behind Door A does not change the odds that the object behind Door A or B.
Of course, that is all irrelevant to the question of whether schools officials should be allowed to perform strip searches regardless of the level of valid suspicion.
She probably exhibited the characteristics of the Advil abuser
That sounds an awful like like Guilty until Proven Innocent.
Yeah, but you know there is a remote control and you know that the living room was the last place you saw it. Your “reasonable assumption” doesn’t come even close to resembling the case discussed. This analogy is terrible.
I was about to pit Justice Thomas myself, over the exact same issue–hell, inspired by the exact same news article–to which Steve MB alludes. He’s a tool. I am not merely embarrassed to be of the same ethnicity as he; not merely embarrased to be of the same gender as he. I’m embarrassed to be of the same species. So filled with self-loathing is he that he will take any opportunity to kowtow to what he perceives to be the interests of authority, power, & convention.
Your kind of a dim fellow, aren’t you?
Yes, and we are, in the language of Thomas used talking about a situation where there is a reasonable suspicion that the searched for item exists. Any search at all is, to some degree, a form of “guilty until proven innocent.” Whether we agree or not that this particular incident of suspicion was reasonable or not it would appear that Thomas does view it as a reasonable suspicion. Starting from that assumption, I think his logic in the quoted part is reasonably sound.
It is a valid point that if you are reasonably confident a searched for item exists in one spot within a set of locations then the fact that you’ve shown it doesn’t exist in one of those locations shouldn’t necessarily change the level of suspicion.
Especially since, if it is known that the search is allowed to search Locations X and Y but not Location Z then if someone is hiding something this makes Location Z the most obvious choice.
To say otherwise seems to me to say that at the border they shouldn’t look for drugs taped to the undercarriage because no drugs are seen in the back seat.
It seems that what Thomas was attempting to say was that if you already had a reasonable suspicion that person X had something illegal with him, the fact that you looked in her backpack and did not find the illegal thing does nothing to “dissipate” that suspicion - only a complete search would do that.
Seems logical enough to me (the question of course being, why did you have “reasonable suspicion” in the first place?)
That being said, strip-searching people for prescription drugs is absurd in the first place.
NM
That makes it even more absurd.
I read it as “prescription strength”.
I have nothing to add except to note the deliciousness of simple language errors in posts that insult the intelligence of others.
Well, dih!
And if the last place you saw the remote was in your significant other’s buttcrack, you make them drop trou. 
The absurdity of Thomas’ “reasoning” becomes clear when an additional fact is noted: the strip search also failed to reveal any illicit drugs. By Thomas’ argument, the still-undissipated suspicion would then require a full body-cavity search, followed by X-rays, stomach-pumping, and whatever other expedient might possibly occur to somebody.
Obviously, a negative result at the initial level of searching does, to some extent, dissipate the origianl suspicion and compels a re-consideration as to whether increased levels of intrusiveness can be justified. My pitting is directed at the mind-numbing illogic of Thomas’ assertion to the contrary.
I’m hoping that this will add a new slang term to American school kids’ vocabulary: “Oh, I stash my drugs up my Clarence Thomas, because you know the teachers can’t search you there,”
If it is “eminently reasonable” to believe the student is hiding the pills up her ass then yes, I suspect Thomas would agree (and I’d still agree his logic is sound on whether suspicion should be reduced by not finding the pills in a backpack or bra).
Personally I don’t know if I’d call it eminently reasonable to suspect a high school student of hiding pills in her ass (or other non-mouth body cavity). But I do think it is reasonable to assume that if hiding pills they’d be hidden in a bra or underwear. After all, back in high school I kept my not-allowed knife in the waistband of my underwear and one of my friends kept her baggie of joints in her bra.
So far as I know, nobody was storing their contraband anally, vaginally, or urethrally. (Though if we thought school administrators might strip search us I suspect the LSD source might have started doing so.)
And again, the fact that kids may be hiding things in these places doesn’t necessarily (and I would say it it doesn’t) justify allowing school officials to search those locations. I’m just addressing the impacts on suspicion that the person is hiding something.
I disagree. The issue surely is the strength of the original suspicion. How can whether or not you find nothing in the backpack change that? It isn’t like you are likely to find a clue in the backpack that the person has, in fact, hidden the drugs in her underwear (I’d say “like a bong”, but really, you don’t need bongs, rolling papers etc. to take Advil).
In short, either you had reasonable grounds to strip-search someone or you did not. If you did, finding the backpack empty doesn’t change that fact. Indeed, the fact that you found nothing at all even after the strip search doesn’t change that, otherwise every time the cops unsuccessfully searched someone they would be sued. The issue is “what information did you have going in”?