WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for police to take DNA samples from all people arrested for serious crimes, a major step toward expanding a national database that will match new suspects to evidence from old crime
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for police to take DNA samples from all people arrested for serious crimes, a major step toward expanding a national database that will match new suspects to evidence from old crime scenes.
The decision means that a mouth swab for DNA is likely to become as common as taking fingerprints and a mug shot for those who are taken to a police station under arrest.
That’s a major victory for investigators, who say DNA testing is the most effective way to catch serial rapists, murderers and other violent criminals. Joined by victims rights advocates, they have pressed for more widespread testing of suspects.
But civil liberties advocates say the move comes at too high a price, given the amount of personal information that a DNA sample potentially can give the government.
All the states and the federal government take a DNA swab of someone convicted of a serious crime. But 29 states and the federal government go further and take DNA samples from at least some people who are arrested. But the constitutionality of testing arrestees had remained in doubt, pending the high court’s ruling.
By a 5-4 vote, the justices approved that practice, rejecting the claim that taking a mouth swab from a suspect amounts to an “unreasonable search.”
“The use of DNA for identification is no different than matching an arrestee’s face to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect; or matching tattoos to known gang symbols … or matching the arrestee’s fingerprints to those recovered from a crime scene,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The only difference between DNA analysis and the accepted use of fingerprints databases is the unparalleled accuracy DNA provides.”
But Justice Antonin Scalia, who joined three of the court’s liberal justices in an unusual lineup, said in an acerbic dissent that taking DNA had nothing to do with identification and everything to do with what the Fourth Amendment prohibits — searching people without any individual cause.
“Make no mistake about it: Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,” Scalia said, reading his dissent from the bench.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined his dissent.
Kennedy said although it can take up to a month to check a DNA sample with the national database, the “FBI has already begun testing devices that will enable police to process the DNA of arrestees within 90 minutes.” The national database run by the FBI has more than 11 million DNA samples on file, and that number is likely to grow sharply in the years ahead.
Kennedy said taking a mouth swab is only a “minimal” intrusion on an individual’s privacy.
“When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and they 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,” Kennedy concluded. Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito agreed.
