Tuesday, June 4, 2013

US Supreme Court Maryland v. King 12-207

Decision here.

   I'm not sure why this decision is so long, but it is.  Most of it is taken up with a history lesson and a science lesson, so read if you're into that sort of thing.  If not, here's the good parts:

   King was arrested after threatening some people with a shotgun.  As part of the booking process, the police obtained a sample of King's DNA using a buccal swab.  This was in accordance with a Maryland law that required collection of DNA samples from people arrested for certain crimes (violent crimes, rapes, that sort of thing.  Colorado has a statute that requires DNA collection from everyone arrested for a felony).

   King's DNA sample was entered into CODIS (the decision explains what CODIS is, but I figure that most of my target audience already knows).  It was found to match the DNA from an unsolved rape in 2003.  The rape case was reopened, and King was eventually arrested for and convicted of that crime.  He appealed, arguing that the DNA collection from his menacing-with-a-shotgun arrest was unconstitutional.  The Maryland court of appeals agreed with him, and this case made it's way to SCOTUS.

   The justices go on to list all kinds of benefits to properly identifying suspects, and mention that identifying a suspect isn't so much a matter of finding out what their name is.  It's more a matter of ensuring that the person arrested is the same as the person who eventually stands trial, and of finding out what else that person has done.  Then the justices go on to talk about how useful DNA is for those purposes.  They compare it to fingerprinting, saying that the only significant difference is that DNA analysis is a lot more accurate.

   The justices also offer an explanation of the police's legal authority to take pictures, prints, measurements (the Bertillon system is mentioned), etc of someone arrested.  It goes like this: ordinarily, the reasonableness of Fourth Amendment intrusions is gauged by individualized suspicion.  However, the Fourth Amendment doesn't actually require individualized suspicion, it only requires reasonableness.  The courts figure out what is reasonable or not by balancing the governmental interests at stake in a particular case against the individual privacy interests at stake in the same case.

   In the case of searching someone's home, or searching a person in public, or most of what else the police do, the privacy interests are pretty high and the governmental interests depend on the aforementioned individualized suspicion.  But in certain contexts (like the context of a custodial arrest, for example), an individual's privacy interests are so diminished that there need not be any individualized suspicion; the mere fact of an arrest justifies the search of a person whether the police think that the person arrested has weapons/contraband or not.

   Anyway, when a person has been arrested and taken to the police station, this diminished expectation of privacy gets weighed against the government interest in identifying the person arrested, and so things like photographs, fingerprints, documentation of tattoos, and head measurements (if you're really old school) are reasonable and permissible.  And now we can add DNA collection to that list.  The court also mentioned several times that CODIS only uses non-coding DNA, and that the DNA is used only for identification purposes and not for medical or familial testing.  The court also mentioned that the statute in question didn't afford the officers any discretion, which further lessened the need for imposing the judgment of a neutral magistrate.

   Short version: if your state has a law that requires DNA samples be taken from some arrestees, then go ahead and do that.

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