Current News |
FBI, States Vastly Expand
DNA Databases
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: April 18, 2009
SOURCE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/19DNA.html?hp
Law enforcement officials are vastly
expanding their collection of DNA to
include millions more people who have
been arrested or detained but not yet
convicted. The move, intended to help
solve more crimes, is raising concerns
about the privacy of petty offenders and
people who are presumed innocent.
Until now, the federal government
genetically tracked only convicts. But
starting this month, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation will join 15 states
that collect DNA samples from those
awaiting trial and will collect DNA from
detained immigrants — the vanguard of a
growing class of genetic registrants.
The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7
million profiles, expects to accelerate
its growth rate from 80,000 new entries
a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a
17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say
they expect DNA processing backlogs —
which now stand at more than 500,000
cases — to increase.
Law enforcement officials say that
expanding the DNA databanks to include
legally innocent people will help solve
more violent crimes. They point out that
DNA has helped convict thousands of
criminals and has exonerated more than
200 wrongfully convicted people.
But criminal justice experts cite Fourth
Amendment privacy concerns and worry
that the nation is becoming a genetic
surveillance society.
“DNA databases were built initially to
deal with violent sexual crimes and
homicides — a very limited number of
crimes,” said Harry Levine, a professor
of sociology at City University of New
York who studies policing trends. “Over
time more and more crimes of decreasing
severity have been added to the
database. Cops and prosecutors like it
because it gives everybody more
information and creates a new suspect
pool.”
Courts have generally upheld laws
authorizing compulsory collection of DNA
from convicts and ex-convicts under
supervised release, on the grounds that
criminal acts diminish privacy rights.
DNA extraction upon arrest potentially
erodes that argument, a recent
Congressional study found. “Courts have
not fully considered legal implications
of recent extensions of DNA-collection
to people whom the government has
arrested but not tried or convicted,”
the report said.
Minors are required to provide DNA
samples in 35 states upon conviction,
and in some states upon arrest. Three
juvenile suspects in November filed the
only current constitutional challenge
against taking DNA at the time of
arrest. The judge temporarily stopped
DNA collection from the three youths,
and the case is continuing.
Sixteen states now take DNA from some
who have been found guilty of
misdemeanors. As more police agencies
take DNA for a greater variety of lesser
and suspected crimes, civil rights
advocates say the government’s power is
becoming too broadly applied. “What we
object to — and what the Constitution
prohibits — is the indiscriminate taking
of DNA for things like writing an
insufficient funds check, shoplifting,
drug convictions,” said Michael Risher,
a lawyer for
the American Civil Liberties Union.
This year, California began taking DNA
upon arrest and expects to nearly double
the growth rate of its database, to
390,000 profiles a year from 200,000.
One of those was Brian Roberts, 29, who
was awaiting trial for methamphetamine
possession. Inside the Twin Towers
Correctional Facility in Los Angeles
last month, Mr. Roberts let a sheriff’s
deputy swab the inside of his cheek.
Mr. Roberts’s DNA will be translated
into a numerical sequence at the
F.B.I.’s DNA database, the largest in
the world.
The system will search for matches
between Mr. Roberts’s DNA and other
profiles every Monday, from now into the
indeterminate future — until one day,
perhaps decades hence, Mr. Roberts might
leave a drop of blood or semen at some
crime scene.
Law enforcement officials say that DNA
extraction upon arrest is no different
than fingerprinting at routine bookings
and that states purge profiles after
people are cleared of suspicion. In
practice, defense lawyers say this is a
laborious process that often involves a
court order. (The F.B.I. says it has
never received a request to purge a
profile from its database.)
When DNA is taken in error, expunging a
profile can be just as difficult. In
Pennsylvania, Ellyn Sapper, a
Philadelphia public defender, has spent
weeks trying to expunge the profile
taken erroneously of a 14-year-old boy
guilty of assault and bicycle theft.
“I’m going to have to get a judge’s
order to make sure that all references
to his DNA are gone,” she said.
The police say that the potential
hazards of genetic surveillance are
worth it because it solves crimes and
because DNA is more accurate than other
physical evidence. “I’ve watched women
go from mug-book to mug-book looking for
the man who raped her,” said Mitch
Morrissey, the Denver district attorney
and an advocate for more expansive DNA
sampling. “It saves women’s lives.”
Mr. Morrissey pointed to Britain, which
has fewer privacy protections than the
United States and has been taking DNA
upon arrest for years. It has a
population of 61 million — and 4.5
million DNA profiles. “About 8 percent
of the people commit about 70 percent of
your crimes, so if you can get the
majority of that community, you don’t
have to do more than that,” he said.
In the United States, 8 percent of the
population would be roughly 24 million
people.
Britain may provide a window into
America’s genetic surveillance future:
As of March 2008, 857,000 people in the
British database, or about one-fifth,
have no current criminal record. In
December, the European Court of Human
Rights ruled that Britain violated
international law by collecting DNA
profiles from innocent people, including
children as young as 10.
Critics are also disturbed by the
demographics of DNA databases. Again
Britain is instructive. According to a
House of Commons report, 27 percent of
black people and 42 percent of black
males are genetically registered,
compared with 6 percent of white people.
As in Britain, expanding genetic
sampling in the United States could
exacerbate racial disparities in the
criminal justice system, according to
Hank Greely, a Stanford University Law
School professor who studies the
intersection of genetics, policing and
race. Mr. Greely estimated that
African-Americans, who are about 12
percent of the national population, make
up 40 percent of the DNA profiles in the
federal database, reflective of their
prison population. He also
expects Latinos, who are about 13
percent of the population and committed
40 percent of last year’s federal
offenses — nearly half of them
immigration crimes — to dominate DNA
databases.
Enforcement officials contend that DNA
is blind to race. Federal profiles
include little more information than the
DNA sequence and the referring police
agency. Subjects’ names are usually kept
by investigators.
Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for
Alameda County, Calif., and an adviser
to crime laboratories, said DNA
demographics reflected the criminal
population. Even if an innocent man’s
DNA was included in a genetic database,
he said, it would come to nothing
without a crime scene sample to match
it. “If you haven’t done anything wrong,
you have nothing to fear,” he said.
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