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
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
By Robert Resta, The DNA Exchange | 07.22.2024
Medical geneticists and genetic counselors have an often complicated and at times tense relationship with people with disabilities, their families, advocates, and scholars. Geneticists are strong advocates and supporters for all of their patients, regardless of their abilities and disabilities...
By Katherine Bourzac, Nature | 07.10.2024
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...