By a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court today
upheld a Maryland law that allows police to
collect DNA from arrestees without first getting
a warrant, NPR reports. "When officers make an
arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a
serious offense and bring the suspect to the
station to be detained in custody, taking and
analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee's DNA is,
like fingerprinting and photographing, a
legitimate police booking procedure that is
reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," said
Justice Anthony Kennedy. He was supported by
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence
Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito.
The dissenting opinion brought together
conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and liberals
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and
Elena Kagan. Scalia, for that group, said, "The
Court's assertion that DNA is being taken, not to
solve crimes, but to identify those in the State's
custody, taxes the credulity of the credulous.
And the Court's comparison of Maryland's DNA
searches to other techniques, such as
fingerprinting, can seem apt only to those who
know no more than today's opinion has chosen to
tell them about how those DNA searches
actually work." The ruling can be found here.
I finally agree with Scalia on something, there's no way you can compare DNA sampling to fingerprinting. You might as well take a shredder or a cheese grater to the 4th Amendment. If you don't have a right to prevent DNA collection from your OWN BODY then you just quite frankly have no rights at all.
www.thecrimereport.org/news/crime-and-justice-news/2013-06-supreme-court-on-md-dna
upheld a Maryland law that allows police to
collect DNA from arrestees without first getting
a warrant, NPR reports. "When officers make an
arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a
serious offense and bring the suspect to the
station to be detained in custody, taking and
analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee's DNA is,
like fingerprinting and photographing, a
legitimate police booking procedure that is
reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," said
Justice Anthony Kennedy. He was supported by
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence
Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito.
The dissenting opinion brought together
conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and liberals
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and
Elena Kagan. Scalia, for that group, said, "The
Court's assertion that DNA is being taken, not to
solve crimes, but to identify those in the State's
custody, taxes the credulity of the credulous.
And the Court's comparison of Maryland's DNA
searches to other techniques, such as
fingerprinting, can seem apt only to those who
know no more than today's opinion has chosen to
tell them about how those DNA searches
actually work." The ruling can be found here.
I finally agree with Scalia on something, there's no way you can compare DNA sampling to fingerprinting. You might as well take a shredder or a cheese grater to the 4th Amendment. If you don't have a right to prevent DNA collection from your OWN BODY then you just quite frankly have no rights at all.
www.thecrimereport.org/news/crime-and-justice-news/2013-06-supreme-court-on-md-dna