Officer and Social Worker "Seized" Teen in High School Counselor's Office

Jones v. Hunt, 2005 WL 1395095 (6/14/05) - In the eyes of a reasonable, emotionally vulnerable 16 year-old plaintiff, she was seized for 4th Amendment purposes when she was confronted by a police officer and a social worker while confined in a Bernalillo High School counselor's office to which she had been sent by a school official. For at least an hour, the officials, who had the authority to determine her custodial care, repeatedly threatened that if she did not agree to live with her father they would arrest her and follow her for two years making her life "hell," and the plaintiff was crying and obviously emotionally fragile and distraught. The plaintiff reasonably believed she would be arrested if she did not agree to go home with her father. The probable cause standard, rather than the reasonable suspicion standard, applied because the officials were not school officials preserving order on school property. In any event, the officials did not meet any reasonable standard because they were acting in contradiction to a court order that required the custody to be with the plaintiff's mother.