Friend,

After a teacher sent Trey Clayton to the library because he would not sit in his assigned seat, an assistant principal angrily reprimanded him and ordered him to come to his office.

There, the administrator “struck Clayton three times on the buttocks with a paddle” with “excessive and great force,” according to a lawsuit Clayton and his mother filed. Following the incident, Clayton – an eighth grader in Tate County, Mississippi, at the time – fainted outside the administrator’s office and fell onto a concrete floor face first.

When he regained consciousness, “he was bleeding, five of his teeth were shattered, and, it was later determined, his jaw was broken,” according to a lawsuit filed after the March 2011 incident. The paddling left bruising and welts on the boy’s buttocks for days.

Clayton, whose jaw was wired shut, missed classes and tests, which the school refused to let him make up. He failed eighth grade, transferred to another school, and eventually dropped out.

While his mother had given the school permission to paddle him when it came down to a choice between corporal punishment or suspension, most parents would never imagine that their child would be brutalized and put in danger of this kind of physical harm for simply failing to sit in a chair.

Yet, three years later, the federal 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Clayton, citing the 1977 U.S. Supreme Court decision Ingraham v. Wright. That ruling rejected the argument that corporal punishment against school children violated the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process.

In the wake of Ingraham v. Wright, approximately 70,000 K-12 public school students receive corporal punishment annually across the 19 states where the punishment is still legal, according to records from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2017-18 school year. Southern states are home to the bulk of these instances.

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