Police May Not Need a Warrant to Rummage Through Your Trash, But Warrantless Collection of DNA Is Unconstitutional
By Jennifer Lynch,
Electronic Frontier Foundation
| 03. 11. 2020
This week, we filed an amicus brief in a South Dakota case arguing that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the police from surreptitiously collecting our DNA without a warrant. This case is one of the first to challenge the collection of DNA from a free person after results of a genetic genealogy database search linked her to a crime.
In the case, prosecutors have charged Teresa Bentaas, a lifelong Sioux Falls resident, with first degree murder for abandoning a newborn 39 years ago. To link Ms. Bentaas to the baby, police secretly collected her DNA from items they found in her trash, extracted and sequenced it, and then compared it to the baby’s. Ms. Bentaas was not under arrest or in police custody at the time they collected and searched her DNA, so, unlike an arrestee, there can be no argument her Fourth Amendment rights were in any way “diminished.”
Ms. Bentaas’s attorneys have filed a motion to suppress the DNA evidence and all evidence collected by the police after that, arguing this secret and warrantless rummaging and data... see more
Related Articles
The Biden-Harris Administration is sure to have a very different approach to science policy than its predecessor. President Biden has always stressed the importance of science and as a symbol of it has installed a portrait of Benjamin Franklin in the Oval Office, placed near a moon rock, as well as busts and paintings representing civil rights activism and other historic events.
The week before his inauguration, he made seven appointments or nominations (some require Congressional approval) under the specific category of Science,...
The new Biden-Harris Administration faces a number of harrowing challenges in which science and technology policies will be critical. Along with the devastating COVID pandemic and the climate crisis, it will have to grapple with important decisions about US federal policy on heritable genome editing.
The Center for Genetics and Society will continue to track, and hope to influence, policy developments related to heritable genome editing that take shape in the White House, Congress, the National Institutes of Health, the...
By Christina Larson, AP | 01.07.2021
WASHINGTON (AP) — If you’re an identical twin who’s always resisted being called a clone of your sibling, scientists say you have a point.
Identical twins are not exactly genetically the same, new research shows.
Scientists in Iceland sequenced DNA...
By Katherine J. Wu, The New York Times | 01.18.2021
After 35 years of sharing everything from a love for jazz music to tubes of lip gloss, twins Kimberly and Kelly Standard assumed that when they became sick with Covid-19 their experiences would be as identical as their DNA.
The...
