If you enjoy reading opinions by Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner, don’t miss this one issued last week–Kristin A. Greenawalt v. Indiana Department of Corrections et al. Judge Posner defines the issue being decided in the case as follows:
Two years after Kristin Greenawalt was hired by the Indiana Department of Corrections as a research analyst, she was told that to keep her job she would have to submit to a psychological examination. The record, limited as it is to the complaint, is silent on the reason for so belated a demand. But she complied and later brought this suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against the Department and two of its officials (whom she sued in their individual capacity)—her immediate supervisor and the official who had ordered her to take the test. She claimed that the test, which lasted two hours and inquired into details of her personal life, constituted an unreasonable search in violation of her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Also, invoking the supplemental jurisdiction of the district court, 28 U.S.C. § 1367, she claimed that whether or not the test was a search, requiring her to take it if she wanted to keep her job both invaded her privacy and deliberately inflicted emotional distress on her, and so violated Indiana’s common law of torts. She asked for damages plus an injunction that would require the defendants to expunge the results of the test from her personnel file.
The Court ends up holding that the Fourth Amendment should not “be interpreted to reach the putting of questions to a person, even when the questions are skillfully designed to elicit what most people would regard as highly personal private information.” However, the Court goes on to note that the plaintiff is not remediless:
Our conclusion that the plaintiff has not stated a Fourth Amendment claim does not leave people in her position remediless—or indeed leave her remediless. States are free to protect privacy more comprehensively than the Fourth Amendment commands; and Greenawalt is free to continue to press her state-law claims in state court, where they belong.
The Court goes on to state that perhaps “it could even be argued that the administration by public officers of a particularly intrusive, and gratuitously humiliating, psychological test is a deprivation, without due process of law, of an interest in privacy that is an aspect of the liberty protected by the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.”