Court approves DNA swabs

last updated 8 January 2015

The Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision this week that police are justified in taking DNA samples from anyone who’s arrested. “Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. But conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, in a sharply worded dissent joined by liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, said the express purpose of DNA collection was not to identify a suspect, but to link him to other crimes. “Make no mistake about it,” he said from the bench. “Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

DNA is just “the 21st-century equivalent of fingerprinting,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. Police routinely run database checks of arrestees’ fingerprints to match them with past crimes. How is this different? It’s more accurate, that’s all, said The Baltimore Sun. Not only can DNA link suspects to unsolved crimes, it can also “help exonerate the innocent and free the falsely convicted.” And swiping a cotton swab on the inside of the cheek is arguably less invasive than inking a suspect’s fingers.

But the case in question proves Scalia’s point, said Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic. Maryland police booked Alonzo King on assault allegations, took his DNA without a warrant, and found that it matched that from an unsolved 2003 rape, for which he was then convicted. Until now, the Supreme Court allowed such “suspicionless searches” only if there was some public-safety justification, such as airport security scans.