Back in court: Police taking DNA samples of arrested. Invasion of privacy?

[Missing User]

[quote]WASHINGTON — The Salisbury, Md. police department thought they had finally caught a break.

A man wearing a hat and scarf and brandishing a gun had raped and robbed a 53-year-old woman in her home and then vanished into the night. Almost six years later, Alonzo King was arrested in a nearby county and charged with felony second-degree assault. Taking advantage of a Maryland law that allowed DNA tests following felony arrests, police took a cheek swab of King's DNA which matched a sample from the 2003 Salisbury rape. King was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison.

But then a Maryland court said it had to let him go.

King was never convicted of the crime for which he was arrested and swabbed. Instead, he pled guilty to the lesser charge of misdemeanor assault, a crime for which Maryland cannot take DNA samples. The courts said it violated King's rights for the state to take his DNA based on an arrest alone. The state Court of Appeals said King had "a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches."[/quote]
[url=http://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/6131425-Court-takes-up-question-of-arrestee-DNA-sampling/] Recommend reading more[/url]

My stance on this is that officers can only take a DNA sample if the suspect has had due process and has been found guilty -- without a warrant -- if they are found guilty (arrested) of a misdemeanor or higher. Tickets/fines/etc are off limits.

[MIPS]

Personally I don't care who they get DNA from or how so long as it does NOT enter a long-term database. Not a match? Bin it.
Throwing the "invasion of privacy" card is conspiracy to obstruct justice.

[Sientanse]

Don't know if its too much an invasion of privacy. The government for all intents and purposes keeps records on all of its citizens. SSN, finger prints, portraits, all of it is kept by the government. While DNA is a bit more extreme, and if completely sequenced can reveal ever so much more than a finger print, DNA as is requires large amounts of samples and effort to completely and accurately sequence, not only that, but a ton of money as well. Current methods in using DNA to match criminals are just simple DNA bar coding methods that are only useful in comparing a section of DNA to a similar section in another sample. So, by all means, take a sample, if you're going to waste tax payer dollars on all the equipment and chemicals to just find out my genotypes and maybe find if I happen to have a mutation that might give me cancer down the road, good luck.

This partially is talking out of my ass, but I have actually done lab experiments in which I analyzed plant and fungal DNA, replicated it, purified samples and sent segments of it off to another lab to have it sequenced. However, the segments we sent were only a few thousand nucleotides long and thus were nothing in comparison to the millions (more?) of nucleotides in a complete human genome.

[Camundongo]

I know this isn't a popular view, but I think there should be a national DNA database (maybe even extending to an international one), not just for criminal cases but identification of both persons alive and dead. You would need to have rigorous laws in place to prevent it being abused, though, and DNA would need to have relative strength as evidence.