After you go back to the OP and read what Thomas actually asserted, get back to us.
“The reasonable suspicion that Redding possessed the pills for distribution purposes did not dissipate simply because the search of her backpack turned up nothing. It was eminently reasonable to conclude that the backpack was empty because Redding was secreting the pills in a place she thought no one would look.”
Here it is, from your OP.
Let’s examine the internal logic of this statement.
**Given: there is a reasonable suspicion that Redding possessed the pills for distribution.
The search of her backpack alone did not, by and of itself, dissipate that suspicion.
A reasonable man might conclude that Redding was secreting the pills on her person.**
OK, what’s wrong there? Given the premisses , how is the conclusion unreasonable?
Not illogical. Unreasonable. Strict rules of logic may be warped and shaped to permit a scrap of rationality to be to inflated beyond all reason, like inflating a Japanese condom into a dirigible. Reasonable people, and hence, reasonable law, demands more than a shallow and trivial point to stand upon.
Obviously, I am not going to concede the preposterous premise that a negative result does not “dissipate”* the expectation of a final positive answer. As I have explained, that is the “reasoning” of a conspiracy crackpot to whom absence of evidence constitutes evidence of a coverup. As I have also explained, this premise leads inexorably to the conclusion that an erroneous initial suspicion is never “dissipated” by any amount of negative results, and must therefore lead to endless escalation of intrusive search.
*If you consider this word to be synonymous with “absolutely eliminate”, your argument is not with me; it is with Noah Webster.
You still haven’t shown me the logical flaw in those simple statements of Thomas that you yourself singled out. You can forget the wild-eyed conspiracy theories and never-ending searches, stuff which clearly proceed from your general dislike for Thomas. I’m talking about a simple patting down. That would do the job of dissipation quite sufficiently for the purposes of your quote from Thomas. (And I repeat, I’m addressing myself to that quote alone, the quote you highlighted as unreasonable. He may well have come to a dumb decision, but it’s not on the basis of the words which you quote.)
And BTW I’m quite content with Webster’s definition.
Oh, never mind. I argue with nonsense too many places already.
Interesting. I quote from an earlier poster in the thread who summed up the position I’m taking quite admirably.
Don’t recall his name.
The premises are incorrect. There was not a reasonable suspicion that Redding had jack (the word of a 13-year-old girl with whom she was feuding does not provide a reasonable suspicion, IMO), and the suspicion that was present was decreased when no pills were found in her backpack. Decreased beyond the threshold of justifying the invasive search conducted.
Yes, it is clear that Thomas views this as a “reasonable suspicion”. It is equally clear that he is wrong.
The trouble with Thomas’s reasoning is that the logical calculus that should be used by the teachers or by the police is not traditional classical logic such as “All A are B, All B are C, therefore, All A are C.” It’s a sort of probabilistic logic. For example, student A accuses student B of having drugs, so we are not sure that student B has drugs – there’s just an X% chance that student B has drugs, and if that X% is above a certain level, it’s a reasonable suspicion. (And, of course, that X% is not a fixed value: it depends on our prior knowlege of students A and B).
So, we search student B’s backpack, and find nothing. Does the chance that student B has drugs remain at X%? Of course not: we know that when students are carrying drugs, sometimes they will have them in their backpack, sometimes in their underwear, and sometimes in other places. So the chance goes down to Y%, based on our new knowledge. Is that still a reasonable suspicion? And is it suspicion big enough to carry out a more intrusive search of the student?
It seems to me that other justices were happy to carry out some kind of logical calculus like this, but Thomas only saw it it black-and-white terms: once a suspect, you remain a suspect until every possibility has been been eliminated.
Taking Thomas’s logical calculus to it’s extreme conclusion, let us suggest that a person is caught selling drugs outside the Supreme Court, and while being questioned on the spot, he points out Justice Thomas walking past, and says to the police, “Hey, that black guy is the dude that sold me the drugs. He’s the pusher.” I trust that Justice Thomas would be overjoyed to be taken away and have every part of his body examined closely to find drugs on or inside him.
Yes, the premisses may well be wrong. You do realize that makes no difference at all as to whether an argument is logically sound?
No. But it does mean that the argument is unreasonable, however internally consistent it may be.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply I’d be arguing with you. It was a response to Steve MB that was just saying again what I’d said before.
Yes, I can see that. Good post.
The apology should be mine. I should have realized you were replying to SteveMB.
Yup. I argued this point as well, upthread.
FWIW, I agree with you: granted his premises, his logic is sound.
I too disagree with his premises.
I’ll field this - what’s happening is that the when the search is upgrated from “checking the backpack and outer pockets” to “strip search”, the definition of “reasonable suspicion” changes. Another student’s word may be suffient to initiate the former, but certainly not the latter.
How does this effect the logic? It implictly adds a moved goalpost to it, because if you do not move the goalpost, then the bolded “Given” ceases to be true when the strip search is proposed, and the argument collapses without that “Given”.
So yeah. The logical flaw is that the premise is being bait-and-swiched; a suspicion sufficient to merit a backpack search is being swapped in for a suspicion sufficient to merit a strip seach, which in actuality certainly wan’t present. So while the “reasonable man” might still be suspicious after checking the backpack, he cannot do anything about it, because that suspicion he still has cannot be refitted into an argument justifying a strip search.
But Thomas isn’t the only one who thought that. Your problem is with the entire Supreme Court, because all of them, from Souter to Scalia, from Ginsberg to Thomas, ALL of the judges agree there was a reasonable suspicion. And I, for one, agree with them. That reasonable suspicion didn’t stretch far enough to allow such an invasive search, but it was sufficient to search her outer clothes and bag.
Except that is entirely not the issue raised in the OP. The OP does not raise whether the search was reasonable at any step but whether Thomas was incorrect to say that one’s level of suspicion that a person possesses an object is materially impacted by failing to find an item in one location among many “eminently reasonable” locations it could be hidden.
Whether Thomas would consider a student’s anus to be an “eminently reasonable” location to suspect I have no idea. Personally I’d say that if you consider someone might be hiding something small on or around their person then it is “eminently reasonable” to suspect they’d hide it in their underwear and so not finding it in their backpack would not significantly attenuate (and certainly would not dissipate to nothing) the level of suspicion. But like I said before, that’s because back in high school, in our underwear is exactly where we tended to hide small contraband. And of course, just because I believe a certain location is an eminently reasonable place to suspect students would hide something does not mean I also agree that it is acceptable that school officials searched that location. I can think of all sorts of places that students might hide things they aren’t supposed to have that I still would argue the school is not entitled to search. But again, that wasn’t the issue raised in the OP.
I do think people are using different meanings of “dissipate” in this thread. It was said to take it up with Noah Webster if you think the word means to go away completely or nearly completely. Except dictionaries do include that definition (which I think is more in line with how Thomas is using the word and how I generally would use the word; when I say “the fog dissipated” I don’t mean it has thinned to some degree, I mean it is gone) along with other definitions that are more tenuous, implying simply that something has attenuated to some degree.
Authority Figure: May I look for contraband in your bag?
Me: Sure, I suppose.
search of bag takes place. No contraband has been found.
Authority Figure: Okay, drop trou. We’ll check your person, next.
Me: When did I say you could do that?
ETA: I didn’t say that it struck me as problematic on constitutional grounds.