Appeals Court Upholds DNA Testing of Felony Suspects

Law enforcement officers may take a DNA sample from anyone arrested on a felony charge without running afoul of the suspect's right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, a divided federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The challenge brought by a group of Californians arrested for alleged felonies but never convicted upheld a 2004 amendment to the state's laws governing DNA collection and use.

In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals compared taking an oral swab from a suspect with fingerprinting arrestees, a decades-old booking practice consistently upheld by the courts as a legitimate identification aid.

"We assess the constitutionality of the 2004 amendment by considering the 'totality of the circumstances,' balancing the arrestees' privacy interests against the government's need for the DNA samples," said the opinion written by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr.

"DNA analysis is an extraordinarily effective tool for law enforcement officials to identify arrestees, solve past crimes, and exonerate innocent suspects," wrote Smith, who was named to the court by President George W. Bush, in an opinion...