Familial DNA and Police Searches (1 Viewer)

[mdnuts]

I was reading the case about where Clark Baldwin was arrested for the murder of 3 women almost 30 years before. What stood out to me (other than Baldwin's actions) was they were lead to Baldwin via a search of a commercial DNA company and found a familial match. I thought that seemed odd, while undoubtedly a good end result, you can't get much more of an expectation of privacy than your DNA. A search around brought me to this law review which was a similar situation.

An excerpt.

The third-party doctrine rests on the assumption that in providing information to a third party, an individual considered the increased likelihood that the third party may, intentionally or otherwise, share that information. Therefore, in making the decision to provide information to a third party, the individual assumed this additional risk.

Some states like Maryland would collect your DNA and store it in their database if you were arrested for a crime (being charged or convicted didn't matter). In this instance, Baldwin hadn't submitted the DNA, not voluntarily or as a result of an arrest. The family member who did submit it didn't do so for the sake of being in a police search (voluntarily or otherwise) but did it for medical or ancestry reasons. As an American there is the right of protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures" (4th Amendment). Courts have long focused and watered down what the term reasonable means.

The article is an interesting read. Hopefully the police have enough evidence to still present the case against Baldwin if the DNA link was tossed out.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

A re-run of the "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" episode on the "Infinity rapist" discussed this concept. OK, it's a police procedural drama, but they claim to pay attention to existing laws and principles. In the episode, an officer submitted a DNA sample to one of those commercial DNA testing companies and found a familial match which led them to the rapist. However, the lawyer got the evidence thrown out because the officer didn't identify himself as a third party and didn't obtain a warrant ahead of time, so the ruling was that privacy (of the person whose DNA was related to the rapist) had been breached.

 

[Isaac]

Hopefully the warrant route is what gets used more of the time.

 

[AccessBlaster]

When you give your DNA voluntarily to a third party do not be surprised when it ends up in a police registry, just sayin.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I still think the migration to a police registry depends on the privacy policies of the DNA testing company.

On the other hand, I am neither confident enough to submit a sample to a DNA database, nor do I actually care to know what is in my biological background. As it happens, though I have stepchildren and grandchildren through them, I have no blood heirs so whatever is in my genes isn't being passed along. My cousins from Lake Charles, LA and Birmingham AL are doing fine passing along the genes in the family.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Kinda reminds me of Minority Report. Police store your DNA just in case you commit a future crime.

"Minority Report" is an action-detective thriller set in Washington D.C. in 2054, where police utilize a psychic technology to arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crime. Tom Cruise plays the head of this Precrime unit

 

[mdnuts]

When you give your DNA voluntarily to a third party do not be surprised when it ends up in a police registry, just sayin.

In this particular instance, the person arrested didn't.