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
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Deni Ellis Béchard, The Washington Post | 10.07.2025
In 1949, when John Gurdon was a 16-year-old boarding school student at Eton College in England, his teacher described his biology studies as “disastrous” and his scientific ambitions as “ridiculous.”
“If he can’t learn simple biological facts,” his term report...
