Thursday, March 13th, 2008...8:04 am
9th Cir: Pre-employment Drug Test for Public Employee
The City of Woodburn, Oregon, requires conditionally-accepted candidates for any position to take a pre-employment drug test. A finalist for the position of part-time library page challenged the requirement under the Fourth Amendment. The 9th Circuit has now upheld the invalidation of the policy, not facially, but as applied to this plaintiff.
The Court of Appeals held that the City had failed to show “special needs” of sufficient weight to justify an exception to the Fourth Amendments’s requiremnt of individualized suspicion. The City couldn’t show 1) employees in this position had drug problems; 2) the employees had any in loco parentis responsibility for children; or 3) the position required high-risk, safety-sensitve tasks (a statement in the Manual to that effect was insufficient).
Lanier v. City of Woodburn, 2008 WL _______ (9th Cir. Mar. 13, 2008).
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