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| Federal appeals court upholds Wisc. DNA data bank |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 01/19/2004 |
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Collecting DNA samples from prison inmates for a statewide databank used to help solve other crimes is constitutional, a federal appeals court ruled last Friday. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago rejected claims from four Wisconsin prison inmates who argued taking DNA samples violated their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. ''Although the taking of a DNA sample is clearly a search, the Fourth Amendment does not proscribe all searches, only those that are unreasonable,'' the court of appeals said. The decision upheld an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb, who dismissed the inmates' complaint. The lawsuit was filed by Norman C. Green Jr., Donald Lee, Glenn Turner and Dennis E. Jones-El, who are housed at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility. The prison, formerly known as Supermax, was designed to house the state's most hardened criminals. The appeals court said that although the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to address the validity of DNA collection statutes under the Fourth Amendment, state and federal courts have almost unanimously upheld similar statutes. ''Courts uphold these DNA collection statutes because the government interest in obtaining reliable DNA identification evidence for storage in a database and possible use in solving past and future crimes outweighs the limited privacy interests that prisoners retain,'' the appeals court said. All 50 states and the federal government have adopted similar laws to Wisconsin. Wisconsin has been collecting DNA samples from sex offenders since 1993, but it started collecting samples from all felons under a law that went into effect in January 2000. Each time a new DNA code is entered into the state database, it is automatically compared to DNA from unsolved crimes to see if there is a match. |
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