As suggested in an earlier posting, the Supreme Court took no substantive position with regard to the issues case of Camreta v. Green. The 9th Circuit case, which factually centered around an elementary school interview by state child protective services worker and a sheriff's deputy, on the trial level involved a 42 U. S. C. §1983 claim, alleging that the in-school interview breached the Fourth Amendment’s proscription on unreasonableseizures. The District Court granted summary judgment to the officials. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, holding that the officials were entitled to qualified immunity from damages liability because no clearly established law had warned them of the illegality of their conduct.
Upon review by the Supreme Court, the Court was initially troubled about two issues; first the issue of whether the prevailing party from the 9th Circuit case could seek review from the Supreme Court and secondly, whether the issues before the Court were moot, since the sheriff's deputy no longer worked in law enforcement and the individual initially interviewed by the social worker and the deputy no longer lived in the state of Oregon where the suit originated and furthermore was days away from her 18th birthday.
The Court dispensed with both of these issues, finding that the prevailing parties could seek review before the Supreme Court and that the case was indeed moot. Nonetheless, the court applied a rule of "vacatur," which, while recognizing that the case was moot, nonetheless allowed the Court to apply any remedy that justice required. In this case,such a remedy required that the 9th circuit holding be vacated, thus effectively stripping the decision of any binding effect in the Ninth Circuit.
All that having been said, it would be a wise practice for every county social services worker in child protective services to be extremely cautious when conducting interviews with children outside of the presence of a parent, realizing that such litigation can and will likely arise again under the right set of circumstances.While it is an interesting claim that a parent has a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to their children in a public school setting, at least one other circuit has found constitutional violations with regard to child interviews by social workers when they took place in a private school setting. See Doe v. Heck, 327 f.3d 492 (7th Cir. 2003). Thus, rather than risk litigation, where an alternative to the private interview exists (and this author is very aware of how some parents make this extremely difficult) that alternative should be given preferred status. And as always when their is a question about the appropriateness of a given proposed action in a social services investigation, legal counsel should be sought first, not after the fact (when the damage has already been done).
The opinion can be found at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-1454.pdf
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