A Jefferson Parish woman is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to alter a judicial precedent in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi that makes public school employees and managers essentially immune from liability when they engage in “unlawful corporal punishment.”
The public interest law firm Institute for Justice filed the petition with the high court on Oct 24 on behalf of Sonia Book, whose 11-year-old autistic daughter was subjected to what Book says were abusive slaps or hits several times by special-needs workers while attending elementary school. Book later sued the Jefferson Parish school board and several school employees in federal district court, but ultimately the U.S. Fifth Circuit of Appeals found that such physical punishment in a school setting is not constitutionally actionable.
“The Fifth Circuit admittedly ‘protect(s) disciplinary corporal punishment from constitutional scrutiny,’” the institute’s petition to the high court states. “In that, it is alone. All nine other circuits to reach the issue disagree with this elimination of students’ rights.”
The petition does not seek a resolution of Book’s case but simply the overturning of the Fifth Circuit’s legal approach to the constitutionality of liability issues relating to corporal punishment in public schools.
The Institute for Justice contends that the Fifth Circuit’s approach to this issue shields public-school educators and other workers from any responsibility or liability when using corporal punishment, no matter how excessive the punishment.
"This case is about ensuring that no public employees are shielded from accountability for unconstitutional force or violence, as public school employees in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas currently are,” one of the institute’s attorneys, Jaba Tsitsuashvili, told the Louisiana Record in an email. “Federal law guarantees the families of schoolchildren subjected to unconstitutional force or violence their day in court."
Book’s daughter, identified only as S.B. in the lawsuit, suffered abusive physical contact carried out by employees at least three times at Schneckenburger Elementary School, according to the petition. Even after S.B. was slapped multiple times by a behavioral technician in February 2020, the principal did not report the employee to authorities but instead transferred her to another school, the petition says.
.“If the school system isn’t going to hold the people who hit my daughter accountable, then I hoped the courts would, but so far that hasn’t happened,” Book said in a prepared statement. “It makes no sense to me that people who hit your kids can get away with it if they work for the school. That’s who my daughter should be able to trust, not fear.”
Book’s February 2021 lawsuit sued the school board and school employees under a section of the federal Civil Rights Act, but that argument was eventually rejected by the Fifth Circuit. The appeals court has rejected similar cases involving the repeated tasing of a disabled student, the choking of a first-grader and the kicking of another student, according to the institute’s petition.
The legal protection of the defendants in Book’s lawsuit is greater than those immunities already granted to police officers and other public workers, according to the institute.
Book’s litigation was brought as part of the institute’s Project on Immunity and Accountability, an effort to address abuses that the institute says come about through the shielding of government officials from liability and accountability when they violate the constitutional rights of other people.