Fourth Amendment violation?
After police used a new technique to arrest a man suspected of being the Golden State Killer, a Maryland legislator proposed a law that would prohibit use of a familial DNA database for the purpose of crime-solving.
House bill 30, sponsored by Delegate Charles Sydnor, D-Baltimore County, seeks to prohibit searches of consumer genealogical databases for the purpose of identifying an offender in connection with a crime through their biological relative’s DNA samples.
In 1994, the state enacted the Maryland DNA Collection Act, which authorized the gathering of DNA for an official investigation of a crime, to identify human remains, and to identify missing persons, among other purposes.
In 2008, Chapter 337 amended the Collection Act to allow the state to gather and retain DNA from people arrested for burglary or violent crimes at the time of their arrest.
The 2008 law also prohibited searching the statewide database for DNA collected from a relative to identify a crime suspect.
The District of Columbia and Maryland are the only two jurisdictions in the country with laws barring searches for familial DNA and partial match analysis, and Maryland was the first to ban searches for blood relatives statewide, according to written testimony from Sydnor, the bill’s sole sponsor.
Such searches may also mean that over 50 percent of Marylanders can be identifiable, even if an individual potentially under scrutiny hasn’t voluntarily submitted their DNA to any database, according to Natalie Ram, an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore.
Four other states – California, Colorado, Texas and Virginia – have developed procedures for using these databases and partial familial matching, but only after all other leads have proven unsuccessful.[…]
The law enforcement officials also stated that information gathered from genealogical databases is used to generate leads, not convict people, and queries going through the database are only for violent criminals.
“It would make it more difficult to bring justice to Maryland’s crime victims,” law enforcement officials said.
But to Sydnor, searching through a DNA database seems to violate both the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and the Maryland Declaration of Rights, which both protect individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures.
“Do not get me wrong, I want to see unsolved crimes resolved and perpetrators of crime prosecuted as well,” Sydnor said in his written testimony.