Clarence Thomas: Facts Do Not Overrule Suspicions

[Zoe]

No school official should ever do a cavity search or even a strip search of a student for any reason. If it’s a matter of safety, the student should be held privately until the police can take charge. Often there is a police officer assigned to the campus.

The rules have become ridiculous. One reason that school officials have this authority to begin with is that they are responsible for protecting your child and everyone else’s. (The stranger on the street is not.) But a strip search for Advil is a case of the tail wagging the dog. Sometimes teachers are just supposed to look the other way and not enforce every tee-nincey rule.

You cannot teach a child you have humiliated.

Not many teachers are going to sign up for the job if they know that doing cavity searches is a hidden but implied part of the job description.

Bricker, I can’t argue this on Constitutional grounds. It seems so obvious to me that I surely must be missing something. But my suspicion that Thomas is a dirty old man has not dissipated since hearing Dr. Hill’s testimony.

[gonzomax]

How can the 2 pills ,maybe in her possession maybe not, constitute distribution? She had quite an operation there. Selling and distributing Advil ,what a business.

[Polycarp]

You know, Bricker’s point that rights should ideally be guaranteed by act of hte legislature rather than judicial fiat has been fairly appealing to me lately.

There are a fair number of states where, like California, matters may be adopted as law by initiative and referendum. What if someone advanced the proposition that every lawyer and every judge, every time they enter court, is to be subjected to a cavity search? It’s certainly reasonable – all it takes is one lawyer with a weapon secreted on his person to subvert justice by force. Hell, he might even be carrying a non-prescription painkiller! And of course the majority of people with the franchise are not lawyers or judges. But enacting such a proposition mught do a lot towards ensuring that a more reasonahle application of the Fourth Amendment is pursued. And it would, of course, be the will of the people, not something enacted by judicial fiat.

[Steve_MB]

@begbert2

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.

Indeed. Thomas’ argument is logically similar to:

A cat has one tail more than no cat.
No cat has two tails.
Ergo, a cat has three tails.

The flaw is that the definition of the term “no cat” slides out from under the first premise.

[Steve_MB]

@obfusciatrist

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.

It is obvious on the face of it that Thomas was incorrect on this point.

To illustrate, suppose that you are shown one red card and a group of black cards. They are shuffled and divided into two piles. You are allowed to take and examine half of the cards in one pile, all of which turn out to be black. You are now given the opportunity to place an even-money bet on which pile contains the red card. Place your bet.

[kaylasdad99]

Door Number Three!

[Cheesesteak]

@Steve_MB

To illustrate, suppose that you are shown one red card and a group of black cards. They are shuffled and divided into two piles. You are allowed to take and examine half of the cards in one pile, all of which turn out to be black. You are now given the opportunity to place an even-money bet on which pile contains the red card. Place your bet.

This is a great example, except of course that we don’t actually know if there’s a red card, and the red card (if there is one) would be deliberately placed in the deck, and the card owner allowing you to examine cards knows whether or not you’ll have a red card in your pile.

Gee, since you let me look at this particular subset of cards and they were all black, it makes it more likely that you do not have a red card at all, carry on!

[Baal_Houtham]

@Steve_MB

To illustrate, suppose that you are shown one red card and a group of black cards. They are shuffled and divided into two piles. You are allowed to take and examine half of the cards in one pile, all of which turn out to be black. You are now given the opportunity to place an even-money bet on which pile contains the red card. Place your bet.

Hey, this actually happened to me one time at a magic show. It turned out the card wasn’t in the second pile either, so I ripped off the guy’s clothes and then fisted him.

Fortunately for me the judge at the trial was Clarence Thomas and he dismissed the case