In a ground breaking ruling yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Maryland v. King that police are permitted to take DNA samples from people arrested for a “serious offense” although not yet convicted. There has been a split among the States as to if it was constitutional to permit such a practice. Currently 28 states have a statute in place that permit police to take a DNA sample from someone who has been arrested. North Carolina is one of the states that have such a statute in place.
The case came to the Supreme Court from Maryland. In that case the defendant had a cheek swab taken after he was arrested for rape. The defendant asserted that the DNA sample that was taken from him should be suppressed as an unlawful search in violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. The majority of Justices in a 5-4 vote ruled that police may take a DNA sample at the arrest level even though it is considered a search for purposes of the 4th Amendment. Usually such a search would require a warrant, but the Court held that since the intrusion was minimal in nature, the arrested individual already has a lessened expectation of privacy and that since law enforcement has an interest in DNA collection that such a search would be permitted without a warrant.
The Court did state that in order for police to take a DNA sample that there must be an arrest for a serious offense. Additionally the Court did not think there would be a misuse of DNA that was collected since it was only analyzed for identifying information and the statute in place limited the purpose for which DNA profiles could be accessed. The Court did not define what a “serious offense” is, so that question may remain unsolved for some time.
