Court: Police Can Take DNA Swabs From Arrestees

My Way ^ | June 3, 2013 | Jesse J. Holland

[Biggirl]

WASHINGTON (AP) - A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Go ahead...try to swab the inside of my cheek flatfoot. They'll be calling you 'Stubbie' before long.

Got GATTACA?

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Kennedy wrote the decision, and was joined by:

Chief Justice John Roberts
Justice Samuel Alito
Justice Clarence Thomas
Justice Stephen Breyer

Scalia was joined in his dissent by:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Elena Kagan

That breakdown on its own is stunning. I would have expected the opposite.

[aimhigh]

I would have expected the opposite.

The most liberal judges will always side with criminals not being identified.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

The most liberal judges will always side with criminals not being identified.

Using that viewpoint you are correct.

However, I am not a criminal and I will not allow my DNA to be taken even if I am arrested. That is my viewpoint. Or, are we once again, to give up a small piece of essential liberty in order to allow the state to supposedly keep us safer from criminals?

[Uri’el-2012]

Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution

[Jack Hammer]

Next: urine and stool samples.

[NY.SS-Bar9]

The most liberal judges will always side with criminals not being identified.

I guess "Secure in their persons" must mean something different to you.

[aimhigh]

I guess "Secure in their persons" must mean something different to you.

I'm not justifying their decision, only explaining it. Liberals chose to protect irresponsibility.

[IronJack]

Now let’s say you have a paranoid government bent on scrutinizing all its subjects. A DNA database would be a great place to start. But you’d have to populate it first. Wouldn’t that be one heck of an incentive to start randomly arresting people on spurious charges that you had no intention of prosecuting?

[garbanzo]

The majority analogized that taking a DNA sample is no more intrusive than taking a fingerprint or booking photo. As police don’t go around spuriously arresting people to collect fingerprints I don’t know that we have any particular grounds for worry here.

[Black Agnes]

And conservatives vote to install GATTACA.

You have no control over what’s done with this information after they take it. Fingerprints can’t be used to elucidate health information about you or any of your first degree relatives. This can be used to implicate your first degree relatives health decisions. Ie, whether or not they GET health care.

And, unlike fingerprints, DNA is easily and cheaply ‘forged’. All someone needs is a drink cup, eating utensil or cigarette butt of yours. They could even filch your dental floss from your trash bin.

Not to mention all the crime lab fraud in the news over the past few years.

[Black Agnes]

There’s no ‘industrial’ benefit gained from giant databases of fingerprints. Just wait till the cops have financial incentive to sell that DNA information.

[staytrue]

I don’t like this. It leads to planting of evidence like hair or dead skin cells. You can’t plant fingerprints.

[publana]

I was shocked as well. Thomas and Alito went along with it. It’s a sad day when I’m on the side of Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg. The Constitution means nothing anymore.

[NY.SS-Bar9]

I'm not justifying their decision, only explaining it. Liberals chose to protect irresponsibility.

Please sit up straight and pay attention:

That infamous liberal, Justice Scalia, wrote a scathing dissent.

Read his thoughts here and come back and tell me this is a good decision.

[microgood]

The problem with DNA databases is that even though the odds of a complete DNA Analysis being wrong is only one in millions, the odds of a DNA database being wrong is only one in the thousands, mainly because many DNA samples in the database are partial.

[Sacajaweau]

As long as you can't be in two places at a time, planting rarely works.

It's the word of the "witness" that is always the biggest problem.

Zimmerman is a good example. Folks saw Tray bashing Zimmerman's head...but apparently that didn't mean much to blacks....and the media.

[Stirner]

“give up a small piece of essential liberty in order to allow the state to supposedly keep us safer from criminals? “

I consider myself a libertarian in some ways, but we all have our quirks and one of mine is not caring too much about privacy. If anyone really wanted to find out stuff about me, I’m confident they could. If it bothers me, I can employ countermeasures, but calling the cops into it to make somebody stop looking at me does not strike me as a small government solution, nor as likely to be effective. I believe that all of us leave our DNA around unavoidably, and all over the place. The technology for identifying DNA segments is getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper, and private parties will quickly find ways to use it (most likely for marketing). The genie is out of the bottle, and anonymity, however valuable it may be, is no longer available. I suppose we could make a point of forbidding government entities from using tracking techniques that can’t be kept out of the hands of private parties, but once private databases exist (such as those maintained by Google, Facebook, or Amazon, augmented by “foolproof” identification security based on the users DNA [No more passwords!]), the government can just turn to them for the information about any of us that they think they need.

Also, the existence of a comprehensive DNA based database could serve other purposes than government overreaches. If we ever did want end unauthorized residence in our territory, it would help if we could determine just who any particular person was. Another plus would be that finding compatible tissue donors would be effortless.