In case you missed it: The Supreme Court has ruled that the police can take a DNA sample from a person without probable cause, without a warrant, and without a conviction. So long as a person has been arrested for a felony, he is subject to an intrusion upon his body. It’s an overt violation of the Fourth Amendment that, given the specific arguments of the Court, will undoubtedly lead to DNA sampling for absolutely any crime for which one may be arrested, including jaywalking or running a red light.
There are incredible problems with all this. First, unlike with fingerprinting, the point of DNA sampling is not to identify a suspect. The sole point is to solve other crimes. This is the explicit intent of the state legislatures that have passed such laws. It is exactly the same as if a state legislature declared that a person’s home was automatically subject to being searched upon that person’s arrest. The police are now allowed to go on horseshit fishing expeditions.
Second, while there are often restrictions placed upon what the police are allowed to do with your DNA, that can be changed on a whim by a given state’s governing body. Moreover, do you trust the government to keep its blinders on? If you had a 100 page journal and a judge told the prosecution that it could read it but it had to stick to pages 14-17, do you really think that would happen? Of course not. Pages 1-13 and 18-100 would be absolutely scoured, regardless whether or not the information found therein could be used directly against you.
The only civil liberties decisions of the past 100 years more important than this one are Brown v Board of Education and Loving v Virginia. Every American is forever subject to suspicionless searches and seizures, less the states pass a sorely needed amendment to the constitution.
Filed under: Politics and Social, Pure bullshit, Pure Rage, Rights | Tagged: DNA, Fourth Amendment | 7 Comments »
For the Sake of Science 