ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 2, 2003 — A federal appeals court declared Thursday that it was unconstitutional to require federal prisoners or those on supervised release to give blood samples for the FBI’s DNA databank.
A THREE-JUDGE PANEL of the 9TH U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the first federal appeals court to address the federal DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act, said requiring convicts to give blood for a criminal database was a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches.
Ruling 2-to-1, the San Francisco-based court said it was an unlawful invasion of privacy because the samples were taken without legal suspicion that the convicts were involved in other crimes.
The DNA samples are turned over to the FBI. The results are analyzed and placed in an FBI databank open to law enforcement nationally.
“Compulsory searches of the bodies of parolees ... require, at a minimum, reasonable suspicion,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote.
The Justice Department did not have immediate comment on the decision.
Monica Knox, a deputy public defender of Los Angeles, said the government had extracted blood from thousands of inmates and former prisoners on supervised release. She said the decision, if it survived appeal, could also nullify state laws that require the taking of blood from inmates.
“Most states have similar laws,” Knox said. “This could gut those.”
The court covers Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Idaho, Washington state, Montana, Nevada and Alaska.
It was not immediately clear whether the decision would apply retroactively, meaning that those who have given blood could have it withdrawn from the databank. In addition, Knox said, it was too early to say whether new convictions based on the blood samples would survive.
“That may have to worked out later,” she said
