They failed.
"DNA swabs on suspects upheld by Supreme Court; High court ruling may affect debate on Mass. policy" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, June 04, 2013
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court narrowly ruled Monday that states could take DNA samples from persons accused of serious crimes, reinvigorating a debate in Massachusetts over whether the state should join more than two dozen others in a practice that critics say threatens civil liberties.
In the highly watched case, the 5-4 decision will allow police officers to take DNA samples without a warrant, making the swabs as common as fingerprinting.
“Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s majority, referring to the constitutional amendment that prohibits unreasonable searches.
In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said the decision would enable a dangerous expansion of police powers.
“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 wrote. ‘‘This will solve some extra crimes, to be sure. But . . . so would taking your children’s DNA when they start public school.”
And sending it along to the NSA.
All states require police to take DNA samples from those convicted of serious crimes. In addition, 28 states and the federal government require authorities to take the samples after arrests for certain crimes, before the suspect is tried. Massachusetts does not, despite calls by Attorney General Martha Coakley for the Legislature to pass such a law. After the court decision, she reiterated that request.
“This step will help solve crimes, hold violent criminals accountable, and prevent crime in the future,’’ Coakley said in a statement to the Globe. “It will also help ensure that innocent people are not falsely accused.”
Will it?
See: Slow Saturday Special: FDA Finds More Problems at Compounding Pharmacies
And you want them to have control of DNA now?
Several Massachusetts lawmakers have filed legislation requiring any person arrested and charged with a felony to submit a DNA sample to police. Those results would be entered into the state’s DNA database.
Notice a conviction is not necessary.
The legislation has been referred to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary, but no action has been taken.
Representative Danielle W. Gregoire, a Marlborough Democrat, first filed legislation on the issue in 2009. A constituent, who was raped while she was in college and has testified at State House hearings, said her attacker would have been caught earlier if he had been required to submit DNA.
And all the guys who have been in jails for years on false charges can be freed.
“With what happened with the Supreme Court today, I hope we can advance it this session,” Gregoire said.
House minority leader Bradley H. Jones, Jr., of North Reading has filed similar measures.
“With fingerprints left at a crime scene you can say, ‘Look we’ve got a possible match.’ Similarly, there may be DNA evidence left at a crime scene that may be an identifier,” said Jones. “Fingerprints have been long held to be not unreasonable to take when someone is arrested. . . . [DNA tests are] not some in-depth procedure. It’s basically a mouth swab, like a strep throat test.”
But the bills have not gained traction, in part because of opposition from civil rights groups and others who worry that the information could be used improperly. One hurdle for supporters may be the current scandal involving the state drug laboratory, in which chemist Annie Dookhan allegedly mixed drug samples and falsified results. Both the drug lab and the DNA testing are done within the state’s Forensic Services Group.
Yeah, imagine what could happen when they start sprinkling some DNA around.
The ACLU’s Massachusetts chapter did not respond to a request for comment, but Max Stern, president of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said his group would oppose such legislation.
“We strongly believe that a person is innocent until proven guilty,” he said. “And they shouldn’t have to be subject to what we would regard as a search and seizure of very personal information simply on the basis of the fact that they are arrested of something they may be cleared of committing.”
Not anymore. It's AmeriKa now.
Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley praised the Supreme Court decision, and downplayed privacy concerns.
“The DNA swabs we take for law enforcement purposes have one purpose: to identify the subject to the exclusion of any other person,” he said. “They carry no private or medical information, nor are we interested in that information.”
The Supreme Court case involved Alonzo King, a man from Maryland who was convicted of raping a 53-year-old woman. The rape occurred in 2003, but no one was charged until 2009, when King was arrested and charged with second-degree assault in a separate case.
Because Maryland law allowed it for certain crimes, including murder and assault, police took a DNA cheek swab. That DNA profile matched a sample from the rape six years earlier. King was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on the rape charge.
King appealed, arguing that his privacy rights were violated because police should not have been allowed to take his DNA. The Maryland Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that it was illegal for the state to take King’s DNA without approval from a judge.
The state of Maryland appealed the matter to the Supreme Court.
Because states make their DNA databases available to the FBI, the decision gives federal prosecutors more information at their fingertips.
Well, they already have all communications.
A national index of DNA profiles maintained by the FBI contains 10.3 million criminal profiles, as well as nearly 1.5 million profiles of those who have been arrested but not yet tried or convicted, according to FBI data updated in April.
Massachusetts supplied 102,000 of the criminal profiles.
The court’s ruling brought forward an unusual coalition among the justices. In the majority were conservative-leaning justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts; liberal-leaning Stephen Breyer; and Kennedy, who is often a swing vote.
Those dissenting were the usually conservative Scalia and usually liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.
The debate focused on the balance between the constitutional right against unreasonable searches and the interests of law enforcement.
They are not supposed to be adversarial and mutually exclusive.
Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, said the DNA samples do not violate that constitutional right and can ensure that an arrestee is properly identified and that his ties to other crimes are discovered.
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"Supreme Court’s DNA ruling: Too much leeway for police" June 08, 2013
The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures is the nation’s bulwark against police excesses, but the Constitution is in a race with science.
That's gone with the NSA revelations.
New means of obtaining private information are being refined every day. Each discovery is welcomed by law enforcement as a new crime-solving tool. But the development of technology shouldn’t, by itself, alter people’s basic expectation of privacy. Just because heat-sensitive scanners can show what goes on behind living room walls doesn’t mean that authorities can legally snoop.
Why would they need those?
And just because DNA testing now enables police to identify suspects with a simple swab of their cheek shouldn’t mean that police can swab people’s cheeks without first having a reasonable suspicion that they were involved in the crime.
But in a rambling opinion this week, the Supreme Court gave police the broad authority to take people’s DNA after they are arrested — even if there’s no genetic evidence involved in the crime for which they’ve been picked up. Then, the government can try to match it with samples from thousands of unsolved cases.
There may be a surface logic to checking whether the suspect in one crime may be linked to others, but there are reasons why allowing police to collect DNA samples upon arrest is a bad idea. First, it’s easy to imagine, in a tense, high-crime atmosphere, that unscrupulous police officers might try to arrest someone just to obtain his DNA in hopes of solving an entirely unrelated crime. Second, once the DNA is obtained and stored, it can theoretically be used for unrelated purposes, such as identifying paternity or determining a person’s genetic predisposition for certain diseases.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a narrow 5-4 majority of the court, defended a Maryland law allowing the DNA swabs on the grounds that it was a simple identification device, like checking a fingerprint. In a sign that at least some of the justices in the majority were a bit queasy about opening the floodgates to DNA testing, Kennedy stressed the extra protections in Maryland’s law; it requires that DNA samples be destroyed if the suspect is found innocent, and that samples be used only for identification purposes. But the decision will surely inspire other states, perhaps including Massachusetts, to expand the situations in which police can take people’s DNA without having probable cause for a search.
It fell to Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the four justices in dissent, to point out that a simpler analysis should have carried the day: “The Fourth Amendment forbids searching a person for evidence of a crime when there is no basis for believing the person is guilty of the crime or is in possession of incriminating evidence. That prohibition is categorical and without exception; it lies at the heart of the Fourth Amendment.”
Better send it over to the FISA Court then.
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UPDATE: The Coming National DNA Database – Eventually, There Would Be A Very Real Possibility That We Would All Have To Submit To “Dna Verification” Before We Could Get On An Airplane, Get A Job, Get A Driver’s License Or Get A Bank Account
Related:
"The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that the federal government can be sued for abuse claims against prison guards."
At least they can't get in your pants:
"No patenting of genes, justices rule; Decision may change the terrain for researchers, patients, biotechs" by Carolyn Y. Johnson and Robert Weisman | Globe Staff, June 13, 2013
The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that human genes are “a product of nature” and cannot be patented, a landmark decision that scientists said could remove impediments to research and enhance patients’ ability to learn the disease risks that lurk in their DNA.
The ruling came in a challenge to patents that Utah-based biotechnology company Myriad Genetics Inc. holds on gene mutations that convey higher risks for breast and ovarian cancer. Those genes have recently been catapulted into the national spotlight by actress Angelina Jolie’s revelation that she had her breasts removed after discovering she had a high genetic risk of developing cancer.
Related: This Post is Tit
Doctors and patients said they hoped the ruling would alter the genetic testing landscape, enticing new companies to offer tests for the cancer gene mutations and provide competition that might bring down the test’s cost, now about $3,300. The decision may also help clarify the situation for hospitals and genome sequencing companies that examine the full genome and provide information to patients about genes that have been patented....
Biotech is unhappy.
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Time to serve your sentence:
"Split high court rules on sentencing guidelines; Says judges must use rules in place at time of crime" by Adam Liptak | New York Times, June 11, 2013
WASHINGTON — In a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that courts violate the Constitution’s ex post facto clause when they take account of the current version of the federal sentencing guidelines if those guidelines call for harsher punishment than the ones in place at the time of the offense.
If such sentencing guidelines were mandatory, as they once were, the case would have been easy. But in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that the guidelines must be treated as advisory to avoid running afoul of a line of Sixth Amendment cases requiring that juries rather than judges make the factual findings supporting criminal sentences.
The question that divided the justices Monday was whether the current discretionary guidelines retained enough force to subject defendants to a substantial risk of additional punishment and thus violate the ex post facto clause’s prohibition of enhanced retroactive punishment.
But telecoms got immunity from lawsuits for spying on Americans.
The case arose from bank fraud committed in 1999 and 2000 by Marvin Peugh, an owner of two farming businesses....
In other action Monday:
■ The high court rejected an appeal from two American whistleblowers who assert US forces tortured them in Iraq and who want to sue former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A federal appeals court ruling found Rumsfeld cannot be held liable for actions taken by subordinates that may have crossed legal bounds.
Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel said they were tortured after they accused an Iraqi-owned company for which they worked of illegally running guns.
■ The justices let stand a court order barring abortion protesters from displaying images of aborted fetuses in places where they may disturb children.
"Ex-wife can keep life insurance payout, court rules" Associated Press, June 04, 2013
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a Virginia law cannot override a federal employee’s decision to make his ex-wife, not his wife, his beneficiary in a federal insurance program.
Warren Hillman made Judy Maretta beneficiary of his Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance policy before their divorce and his re-marriage to Jacqueline Hillman. He never changed his beneficiary designation, and Maretta got the money after his death.
The second wife sued, but the Virginia Supreme Court said the first wife gets the money since her name was on the form.
Virginia law favors the current spouse. But Maretta argued the revocation was preempted by federal law saying named beneficiaries get the money. The Supreme Court agreed in a unanimous judgment.
In other action Monday:
■ The justices rejected an Army officer’s appeal of his conviction for killing an unarmed Iraqi prison detainee in 2008.
The justices let stand a divided decision by the military’s highest appeals court that upheld the conviction of First Lieutenant Michael Behenna for unpremeditated murder in a combat zone. Behenna is serving a 15-year prison sentence at a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
■ The justices agreed to decide whether to reinstate a man’s conviction for protesting outside a military base in California. Federal officials on Monday asked justices to reinstate John Dennis Apel’s trespass convictions. Apel had been banned from Vandenberg Air Force Base, so he set up a protest area on a highway that passes through the base.
Federal appeals judges overturned his conviction, saying the military does not have exclusive right of possession to the highway.
