- Californians recently approved a measure to create one
of the nation's most aggressive criminal DNA databases, but civil liberties
groups and privacy advocates are fighting to get it scaled back.
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- Law enforcement officials say Proposition 69 will be
a boon to solving a growing backlog of violent crime cases, but it also
raises the possibility of innocent people getting trapped in the vast
database
along with murderers and rapists and having limited ability to get their
file expunged.
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- The new law, officially called the DNA Fingerprint,
Unsolved
Crime and Innocence Protection Act, is expected to add the genetic data
of 1 million people to California's databank over the five years, making
it the largest state-run DNA databank in the country.
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- The law, approved by 62 percent of the state's voters
in the Nov. 2 election, allows police to take DNA samples from every adult
and juvenile convicted of a felony and from all adults arrested for
specific
felonies such as sexual assault and murder. In 2009, the law will be
broadened
to enable police to gather DNA data from anyone arrested for any felony
-- ranging from residential burglary to murder -- whether or not they are
ever charged or convicted with a crime.
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- The American Civil Liberties Union is planning to file
a lawsuit challenging the act before the end of the year, but a spokeswoman
from the Northern California chapter of the ACLU would not discuss details
of that case, saying the group is still working out the details.
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- Attempts to legally block DNA databases in other states
have not succeeded. In Wisconsin, for example, a lawsuit filed earlier
this year by prisoners who argued that giving DNA samples violated their
4th Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure was
tossed
out by a federal appeals court.
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- Critics say collecting DNA of mere suspects subverts
the notion that people are innocent until proven guilty. While 35 other
states require DNA samples to be taken from convicted felons, Louisiana
is the only other state that requires testing of people arrested for a
felony.
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- Under the new law, the state government has no obligation
to remove the files of people who are arrested and later cleared of crimes.
To expunge their genetic fingerprint from the state's forensic library,
Californians will have to petition first to the trial court presiding the
case, then the local district attorney's office and the state Department
of Justice. And there's no guarantee that an innocent citizen will prevail:
The court can deny the removal request and that decision can not be
appealed.
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- The law was considered so draconian that the editorial
boards over 30 California newspapers opposed it, along with a solid array
of privacy and political groups.
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- Even California Attorney General Bill Lockyer voiced
doubts about the measure's extensive reach.
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- "I personally wouldn't have put arrests in the
measure,"
Lockyer said on San Francisco's public radio station, KQED, in October.
He also said that he would have made it simpler for people to get their
information off the files.
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- "I think that many Californians were not fully
informed
about the full scope of the initiative," said Maya Harris, a staff
attorney for the Northern California chapter of the ACLU. "The
proponents
of the proposition misled people into believing it only applied to people
that had been convicted of a crime."
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- Prop. 69 was backed by all California's major law
enforcement
agencies, including police departments and D.A. offices. Officials point
to the success of Virginia's DNA database, which includes nonviolent
felons.
Virginia has 216,000 DNA profiles in its forensic library which have solved
2,000 cases, according to the Virginia Attorney General's Office. In
comparison,
California's 274,000 files -- limited to violent felons -- have solved
a little over a 1,000 cases.
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- Proponents of DNA databases argue that innocent people
have no reason to fear giving their genetic information to authorities
solely for identification purposes, but misidentification through DNA
testing
is not unheard of.
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- Tight security measures would make a similar fiascos
nearly impossible at California's state crime lab, a California DOJ
spokeswoman
implied.
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- "Only three people are allowed to access the
databank,"
said Hallye Jordan.
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- DNA samples taken from suspects by swabbing their inner
cheek are assigned a barcode and stored in one database and DNA samples
taken from crime scenes are stored in a separate database, Jordan said.
The three members of the crime lab's "cold hit team" at the
state's
DNA lab in Richmond run searches comparing DNA samples from the two
databases,
and notify local agencies of any matches.
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- She added that the state is working on one-page form
that will simplify the process of expunging files from the DNA database.
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