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| Justice Scalia says DNA swabs pave the way to a "police state" Image: Shutterstock |
While the Supreme Court has a fairly clear divide on who is
liberal and who is not, the last year has shown that dissent from political
ideals not only happens, but is in fact fairly common. This was the case with Justice Scalia’s nearly
always-conservative vote against the legalization of DNA checks during police
book procedures. Scalia, who has
previously been on record
as a defender of citizen privacy, called the 5-4 decision to allow states
to pass DNA identification systems as an abuse of power, paving the way to a
“police state” that would allow law enforcement to arrest citizens for minor
offenses if they are suspected in other more serious crimes.
The plaintiff in the
case, Alonzo King, filed a complaint against the state of Maine for a violation
of his fourth
amendment rights that bar officials from unreasonable search and
seizure. King had been arrested for
assault and police took a DNA swab from his cheek. The DNA sample was run through a data base
and was matched to a rape case from six years prior, and King was convicted of
the rape shortly after. Later, a court
threw out his conviction, claiming that police do not have the right to use DNA
databases to “fish” for other criminal activity just because someone is
arrested.
Justice Scalia and three other traditionally liberal
Justices (Kagan, Sotomayor and Ginsburg) agreed with the appeals court,
insisting that DNA is private property and that the long procedure for
collecting and processing DNA means it is not crucial to identifying a suspect
the way fingerprinting is. However, the
other five Justices used fingerprinting to defend DNA identification and the
law in Maine and thirty other states was upheld. Scalia wrote in his dissent paper that
swabbing for DNA is primarily used to find evidence for crimes other than what
the suspect is being processed for, and equated to searching homes of suspects
on a hunch that they might have done something wrong.
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