Defense attorneys, civil rights and civil liberties groups lined up again this week to testify against bills calling for suspects arrested in violent crimes to submit to DNA tests.
The latest DNA bills are both broader and narrower than Gov. Martin O?Malley?s original proposal. Opponents call the proposed bills violations of constitutional protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
“It?s not about the amount of intrusion,” said Stephen Mercer, a Montgomery County defense attorney. It?s about the information that?s being collected at the time of arrest. DNA, Mercer and others noted, is not just identifying information such as a mug shot or fingerprint, but contains information about health and ancestry related to suspects and their families.
Baltimore County Democrat Sens. Norman Stone and Jim Brochin, sponsors of a bill to require DNA samples from rape suspects, disagreed.
“I don?t believe it?s any more intrusive than taking a fingerprint,” Stone said at a hearing Thursday.
“I don?t see the unreasonableness of anything,” Brochin told Mercer.
“The fingerprint tells nothing about the person or the family,” Mercer said.
Brochin said that DNA can also be used to help exonerate people, as it did Kirk Bloodsworth, who had been sentenced to death for a murder he didn?t commit. But Patrick Kent, forensics chief for the public defender?s office, said the proposals are “not about exonerating people” but about collecting samples from people who haven?t been convicted of crimes.
The bills provide that samples from those arrested but not charged should be taken out of the database, but “we?ve never successfullyimplemented it” at the State Police Laboratory. “Expungement is never going to be anything other than hypothetical,” Kent said.
Elbridge James, of the Baltimore City chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the group opposed the practice because of the widespread arrests of 20,000 to 30,000 people in the city who are never charged with a crime. “Where?s the presumption of innocence?” James said.
Cindy Boersma of the American Civil Liberties Union said, “We know that DNA evidence now is being mishandled” and the organization does not want even more DNA samples put into an overloaded system.
