Crime and (Corporal) Punishment: Revisiting Ingraham v. Wright and Banning School Corporal Punishment Under the Fourth Amendment

While it may seem unimaginable that teachers may lawfully paddle students in 2022, school corporal punishment is common in many U.S. public schools today. Despite the negative consequences it has on children, corporal punishment has persisted for decades. Educators’ continual use of corporal punishment is due in large part to the 1977 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Ingraham v. Wright. In that case, the Court found no Eighth or Fourteenth Amendment violations for school corporal punishment and upheld the right of individual states to draft their own pertinent legislation.

In the 45 years since, federal courts have reached vastly different conclusions in school corporal punishment cases, given that the Ingraham Court provided no concrete analytical framework from which to examine these issues. However, in the last 20 years, a trend has emerged, with petitioners subjected to school corporal punishment alleging violations of their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable seizures. This trend has created a split among the federal circuit courts of appeals: the Seventh and Ninth Circuits found that school corporal punishment may violate the Fourth Amendment under some circumstances. On the other hand, in T.O. v. Fort Bend Independent School District, the Fifth Circuit held that a teacher did not violate a first-grade student’s Fourth Amendment rights when placing him in a chokehold.

From spanking, to paddling, to now choking children, the Ingraham decision and subsequent silence from the nation’s highest court have allowed school corporal punishment to escalate drastically. Given the practice’s prevalence and increasing severity, the federal government should immediately ban school corporal punishment. Alternatively, the Supreme Court should overrule Ingraham and resolve the circuit split by creating a bright-line rule categorizing school corporal punishment as a seizure.