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| Mass. SJC: prisoners' laundry fair game for DNA samples |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 03/29/2004 |
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The state's highest court ruled last Wednesday that police can examine a jail inmate's laundry for DNA samples to help them solve a case. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled, upholding a first-degree murder conviction, that the defendant ''did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the items seized.'' ''Any rights he might have enjoyed were abandoned'' when Jordan Martel Rice gave up the items for laundering, the SJC said in a 29-page opinion written by Justice Francis Spina. Rice, convicted in 1996 for a Sept. 23, 1995 murder in Brockton, brought numerous arguments on appeal. The SJC rejected them all, including an argument that police should not have been able to use as evidence DNA samples that were taken from his laundry, which included his bed sheets, his jail uniform and his T-shirt. Rice had handed his laundry through his cell door to a corrections officer while he was in custody at the Suffolk County jail in August 1996, on a separate charge. DNA samples obtained from his laundry matched DNA found on the victim. Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University, said the ruling might be a help to law enforcement. It still takes a warrant for officers investigating a crime to extract blood or other bodily materials from jail inmates to get DNA information because it is intrusive, he said. ''It's still not easy in all cases to get the evidence,'' he said, but the Rice case appears to show ''there are various ways of skirting the legal requirement.'' Veteran defense attorney Andrew Good wasn't surprised by the ruling. ''The general notion in the law is that if you dispose of something and it includes a Coke bottle that has your DNA on the lip, that's your tough luck,'' he said. |
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