{"id":38804,"date":"2013-06-04T05:56:10","date_gmt":"2013-06-04T04:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/us-supreme-court-allows-police-to-take-dna-samples-of-arrestees\/38804\/"},"modified":"2013-06-04T06:48:54","modified_gmt":"2013-06-04T05:48:54","slug":"us-supreme-court-allows-police-to-take-dna-samples-of-arrestees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/us-supreme-court-allows-police-to-take-dna-samples-of-arrestees\/","title":{"rendered":"US Supreme Court allows police to take DNA samples of arrestees"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The US Supreme Court ruling on Monday that police can collect DNA samples from arrestees is another major attack on constitutional rights and an expansion in the powers of the state.<\/span><\/h3>\n

The 5-4 decision has vast implications not just for facilitating the growth of the state database of genetic information\u2013which currently includes more than 11 million individuals\u2013but for the basic right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The decision allows for the collection of DNA information of individuals who are not convicted of a crime, and are therefore presumed innocent, to be used as evidence in cases for which the state has no reasonable suspicion that they are guilty.<\/p>\n

In overturning a previous ruling by the Maryland Court of Appeals, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, argued that swabbing for DNA samples is akin to fingerprinting and mugshots\u2013a \u201clegitimate police booking procedure\u201d that can be used to identify the arrestee. In fact, the acquired evidence is not used primarily for identification, but for submission in government databases.<\/p>\n

Kennedy was joined by most of the traditional right-wing of the court, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, along with a traditional liberal, Justice Stephen Breyer. The dissent was written by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.<\/p>\n

The case, Maryland vs. King,<\/em> involved a Maryland man, Alonzo Jay King Jr., who was arrested in 2009 on assault charges. Before being convicted on assault, his DNA was obtained. This led to his conviction in an unrelated rape charge from 2003.<\/p>\n

The Maryland appeals court overturned the rape conviction, ruling that the state law authorizing DNA collection from arrestees was a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which says that the \u201cright of the people to be secure in their persons, house, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Maryland court ruled that the \u201cweighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicion-less searches\u201d overruled any \u201cpurported interests in assuring proper identification,\u201d and that DNA provided a \u201cvast genetic treasure map\u201d for the state to utilize.<\/p>\n

It speaks to the decay of liberalism that it was left to the arch-reactionary Scalia to make certain valid points, from a libertarian perspective, in opposition to the majority ruling. Reading his decision from the bench, Scalia noted that the majority was carrying out a \u201csleight of hand\u201d by justifying the collection of DNA data as necessary for identification.<\/p>\n

\u201cMake no mistake about it: because of today\u2019s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.\u201d He added that \u201cthe proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would not have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same logic that is used to justify warrantless seizure of DNA evidence could be employed to argue for a vast array of intrusive information-gathering activities by the state\u2013any one of which might also have the effect of obtaining information to solve past crimes.<\/p>\n

In opposing the decision, Steven Shapiro, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that it \u201ccreates a gaping new exception to the Fourth Amendment,\u201d which \u201chas long been understood to mean that the police cannot search for evidence of a crime\u2013and all nine justices agreed that DNA testing is a search\u2013without individualized suspicion. Today\u2019s decision eliminates that crucial safeguard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, while Maryland\u2019s law limits DNA collection to those arrested for \u201cserious\u201d crimes, laws in other states are much broader. Twenty-seven states as well as the federal government have laws or regulations that allow for this practice.<\/p>\n

A friend of the court brief from the Electronic Privacy Information Center noted that the Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS) has been vastly expanded over the past several years. While it \u201conce included DNA profiles of only convicted sex offenders,\u201d it \u201cnow contains more than eleven million profiles.\u201d<\/p>\n

The EPIC brief noted, moreover, that CODIS \u201cis not strictly limited, as all law enforcement agencies in the country, at the federal, state and local levels, have access for purposes of DNA matching. As CODIS expands, individual privacy rights are implicated, and not just for the individuals whose DNA is collected; the ability to search for partial matches also implicates the privacy rights of family members whose DNA is a close enough match that the person is flagged in a CODIS DNA search.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, the state, under the banner of the \u201cwar on terror,\u201d has begun constructing vast databases of emails, text messages, Internet activity, financial information and criminal and medical records. There is no doubt that DNA data will be incorporated into this systematic spying operation directed at the American people.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court decision is another in a long line of judicial attacks on fundamental democratic rights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US Supreme Court ruling on Monday that police can collect DNA samples from arrestees is another major attack on constitutional rights and an expansion in the powers of the state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28010,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1614],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-38804","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-surveillance-big-brother"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}