Ethics Newsline®

SAN FRANCISCO
Federal inmates and parolees cannot be forced to provide authorities with samples of their blood for storage in a DNA databank to solve future crimes, a federal appeals court ruled last week.

A three-member panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the ruling, saying the forced submission of DNA samples violates the Fourth Amendment, which contains protections against unusual search and seizure.

The panel’s 2-to-1 ruling, comes in the case of Thomas Kincade, a convicted bank robber who refused to provide his parole officer with a blood sample to be analyzed and archived in a DNA databank.

Kincade, who had been released from prison, was sentenced to a four-month term for refusing to comply with the law — the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act of 2000 — which targets people convicted of certain offenses.

Kincade argued that the law was unduly intrusive and violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The government disagreed, saying the process was no different than taking a criminal’s fingerprints, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Last week, the 9th Circuit panel sided with Kincade, saying that drawing blood to examine a person’s DNA is significantly different from an “examination of physical attributes that are generally exposed to public view.”

“Compulsory searches of the bodies of parolees such as Kincade require, at a minimum, reasonable suspicion” of a crime and cannot be undertaken simply for general law-enforcement purposes, Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for the panel’s majority.

Despite its good intentions, the 2000 law represents an “alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens (are) being whittled away by imperceptible steps,” Reinhardt warned, quoting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on eavesdropping.

“The fact that these statutes currently affect only those individuals most susceptible to state supervision renders this threat no less important,” Reinhardt added, according to the Times.

The ruling puts not only the 2000 law in question, but also the stored samples and current convictions achieved by using the three-year-old database, noted the Associated Press.

The federal government is deciding whether or not to appeal last week’s ruling, which affects nine western states.