The strip search of a 13-year-old Safford school girl to see if she had drugs was unjustified and excessive, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday.

In a split decision, the full court overruled its own three-judge panel which had concluded that school officials had reasonable grounds to believe that the girl was violating either states laws or, at least school policies. Judge Kim Wardlaw, writing the ruling, said school officials “acted contrary to all reason and common sense as they trampled over her legitimate and substantial interests in privacy and security of her person.”

The judge specifically said the tip from an “informant” another student  was unreliable, especially as the girl had never been in trouble before. And Wardlaw said school officials overreacted given that they were searching for nothing more than a prescriptionstrength version of ibuprofen, a pain killer that in smaller doses is sold over the counter.

But Judge Barry Silverman, writing for the dissent, said he believes the facts of this case provided school officials with “sufficient information” to reasonably suspect she had a pill, one which Silverman said had a high enough dosage to be potentially dangerous to children.

Mark Tregaskes, superintendent of the Safford Unified School District, said he had not seen the ruling. But Tregaskes said that the school has made several alterations to its policies since the 2003 incident that would make it “less likely” a student would be stripped searched in similar circumstances.

What ultimately led to the search was that girl, caught with some pills, said she got them from the girl in question here. That occurred the same time another student told the vice principal some kids were planning to take drugs.

The girl, under questioning by school officials, denied bringing pills to school, denied distributing pills to classmates and said consented to the search.

She was told to pull her bra to the side and shake it, exposing her breasts, and being told to pull her underwear out of her crotch and shake it, exposing her pubic area. The search produced nothing.

Her mother subsequently filed suit alleging her daughter’s constitutional rights were violated. But a trial judge threw out the case, as did a threejudge panel of the appellate court.

Wardlaw said the test of whether a search of a student in school is permissible is whether the actions are reasonably related to the objectives of the search, the age and sex of the student, and the nature of the infraction. She said that is designed to balance the need of schools to maintain order while avoiding

“unrestrained intrusions upon the privacy of schoolchildren.”

That, the judge said, did not occur here.

Wardlaw said the basis for the search was the “unsubstantiated tip” of another student, who had been caught with drugs, “seeking to shift the blame from herself.”

Beyond that, the judge said the search was excessive. Wardlaw said if school officials were concerned the girl were going to give drugs to other students they could have just kept her in the principal’s office or sent her home instead of forcing her to remove her clothes.

“And all this to find prescriptionstrength ibuprofen pills,” Wardlaw said. “We reject Safford’s efforts to lump together these runofthemill antiinflammatory pills with the evocative term ‘prescription drugs,’ in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young girl behind a larger war against drugs.”

Finally, Wardlaw said the precedent that students have some rights against unreasonable searches had been set by the U.S. Supreme Court 18 years earlier, and that Kerry Wilson, the assistant principal who initiated and directed the search, should have been aware that his actions were illegal.

“That’s always going to be a concern (while) at the same time, balancing it with constitutional rights,” he said. “We’ve placed additional safeguards in place so that when situations like this, if they arrive in the future again, that there are additional checks and balances, if you want to call that, before we would proceed in doing searches to the extent that this one was done.”