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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California Attorney General Kamala Harris and the Obama administration are urging a federal appeals court to uphold California's mandatory collection of DNA samples from everyone arrested in the state as a constitutional and powerful law enforcement tool.
A specially convened panel of 11 judges of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal in San Francisco is scheduled to hear oral arguments on an American Civil Liberties Union legal challenge to the collection. The ACLU alleges collecting DNA from all arrestees is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy because not all persons arrested are convicted of crimes.
At issue is a voter-approved law that went into effect in 2009 that significantly expands California's DNA database, which now contains some 2 million samples. The samples are compared to DNA evidence kept from long-ago crimes in hopes of finding a match. More than 10,000 suspects have been identified through the database in the last five years.
The 9th Circuit appeared on the verge of striking down the law after a first round of oral arguments last year. But before the...
A specially convened panel of 11 judges of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal in San Francisco is scheduled to hear oral arguments on an American Civil Liberties Union legal challenge to the collection. The ACLU alleges collecting DNA from all arrestees is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy because not all persons arrested are convicted of crimes.
At issue is a voter-approved law that went into effect in 2009 that significantly expands California's DNA database, which now contains some 2 million samples. The samples are compared to DNA evidence kept from long-ago crimes in hopes of finding a match. More than 10,000 suspects have been identified through the database in the last five years.
The 9th Circuit appeared on the verge of striking down the law after a first round of oral arguments last year. But before the...