Judge Poised to Advance Suit Over California DNA Collection
By Nicholas Iovino,
Courthouse News Service
| 05. 01. 2019
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – Despite prior court rulings that police can collect DNA samples from people arrested but not convicted of crimes, a state court judge hinted Wednesday that holding onto that DNA data might violate the California Constitution.
“What about the person who is arrested mistakenly,” San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman asked in court Wednesday. “That person’s sample then remains in the system forever, right? Regardless of the fact that there’s no criminal conviction.”
Schulman was responding to a state lawyer’s argument that California’s need to identify criminals outweighs the privacy interests of those arrested but not convicted of felonies.
The lawsuit is the latest challenge to DNA collection laws by privacy advocates after a series of recent legal setbacks. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in Maryland v. King that a state law requiring DNA collection for arrestees charged with “serious crimes” did not violate the Fourth Amendment. One year later, an en banc Ninth Circuit panel held that California’s DNA collection law does not violate the U.S. constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches...
Related Articles
What We Inherit by Sam Trejo and Daphne O. Martschenko; and Original Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden have a great deal in common, with substantial differences in style and emphasis. Both books attempt, in different ways, to show the reader just where current research into human genomics stands, where that might be going, and why the authors are interested. In short, the influence of genomic research on our societies is already large and seems likely to change them in ways...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 07.30.2026
As of this week in Montana, any biotech company with an experimental drug has a clear path to selling it to consumers. Companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing—sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people—can pay $12,500 to...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 07.23.2026
When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been carefully removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have a matter of hours to get it into a recipient. Leave...
By Dhruv Mehrotra , Wired | 08.03.2026
On March 13, 2025, Hugo Moreno-Mendez arrived at the McLennan County Probation Department in Waco, Texas, expecting a routine probation check-in. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting to arrest him.
According to a criminal complaint reviewed by WIRED...
