State and federal law enforcement agencies scored a major victory last week when the Supreme Court ruled that sampling DNA from any person arrested for a serious crime does not violate the U.S. Constitution.
The court’s ruling reinstated the rape conviction of Alonzo King, who was arrested in Maryland in April 2009 for assault. After King’s arrest, pursuant to the Maryland DNA Collection Act, police collected a DNA sample from the inside of his cheek and uploaded it to the Maryland DNA database. His DNA sample matched a sample taken from an unsolved 2003 rape case and he was later found guilty of rape and sentenced to life in prison without parole. His conviction was overturned by the Maryland Court of Appeals, which found that the portions of the Maryland DNA Collection Act that permitted DNA collection from arrestees were unconstitutional.
An Unusual Split
The 5-4 decision caused a rare division in the court, which often splits along predictable liberal and conservative lines. Justice Anthony Kennedy, often considered a swing-voter on the court, drafted the opinion of the majority, which was joined by the usually liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, and the conservative bloc of Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, and Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s most outspoken conservative, drafted the dissent, joined by the liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The Majority Opinion
The majority opinion compares a DNA profile to other types of identification, like fingerprints and photographs, which are routinely obtained from arrestees. While acknowledging that sampling an arrestee’s DNA is a search governed by the Fourth Amendment, Justice Kennedy reasons that the government has a strong legitimate interest in “knowing for an absolute certainty the identity of the person arrested, in knowing whether he is wanted elsewhere, and in ensuring his identification in the event he flees prosecution.” Balancing this “substantial government interest” with the “brief intrusion of an arrestee’s person” required to obtain a DNA sample, Kennedy finds DNA sampling to be a “reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure.”
The Dissent
In the dissent, Justice Scalia accuses the majority of being disingenuous in suggesting that DNA samples are used for the primary purpose of identification, when in fact, they are most often used for improper investigative purposes. He notes that “such suspicionless searches are never allowed if their principal end is ordinary crime-solving.” Scalia dismisses the majority’s proposed limitation of DNA sampling to those arrested only for “serious offenses” and warns that this is the beginning of a slippery slope where “your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”
Derek is currently blogging for GTL DNA, a genetics testing company.
Image Credit: banspy
