Ilya, Jim, and Roger have already ably covered many of the legal issues in yesterday’s major Fourth Amendment case, Maryland v. King, in which the Court narrowly approved DNA testing of arrestees. I’ve got an article in the Daily Beast this morning using Scalia’s dissent as my jumping-off point. Excerpt:
If there’s ever a time when Antonin Scalia really rises to the occasion, it’s when he serves as the Supreme Court’s liberal conscience.…
[A]long with the good [from DNA testing] comes a new potential, warned against by civil libertarians, for the authorities to use DNA access to track citizens through life. Who was at the closed-door meeting of political dissidents? Swab the discarded drinking cups for traces of saliva, match it to a universal database, and there you’ve got your list of attendees. Want to escape a bad start and begin life over in a different community? Good luck with that once your origins are an open book to officialdom.
In his dissent, Scalia warns of such a “genetic panopticon.” (The reference is to Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a prison laid out so that inmates could be watched at every moment.) And it’s closer than you may think. Already fingerprint requirements have multiplied, as the dissent points out, “from convicted criminals, to arrestees, to civil servants, to immigrants, to everyone with a driver’s license” in some states. DNA sample requirements are now following a similar path, starting reasonably enough with convicts before expanding, under laws passed by more than half the states as well as Maryland, to arrestees. (“Nearly one-third of Americans will be arrested for some offense by age 23.”) Soon will come wider circles. How long before you’ll be asked to give a DNA swab before you can board a plane, work as a lawn contractor, join the football team at your high school, or drive?
…
With the confidence that once characterized liberals of the Earl Warren–William Brennan school, Scalia says we can’t make catching more bad guys the be-all and end-all of criminal process:
“Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches. The Fourth Amendment must prevail. … I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”
Incidentally, some of Scalia’s most scathing passages blast the majority for dwelling on objectives that Maryland might have accomplished by DNA testing, such as establishing a John Doe arrestee’s true identity, when in fact the state knew perfectly well who Alonzo King was when it collared him. Scalia nailed this rationale as merely pretextual, and just in case you doubted that, in a Washington Post interview just yesterday about the case, Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler frankly acknowledged that “the real reason for the law is solving crime.” Nothing there about a need to establish arrestees’ identities. The state’s own website explaining the law tells a similar story in its final sentence when it describes the 2009 change in the law.
