Thursday, January 1, 2015

Buza Reloaded: Fourth Amendment Balancing


This is the third installment on Buza II, the opinion of the California court of appeal that invalidates the state's DNA-on-arrest law. It comments on the court of appeal's treatment of the definition of a "search" and the court's claim that the reasons the Supreme Court gave in Maryland v. King for upholding post-arraignment DNA collection from Alonzo King are "completely inapplicable" to taking DNA from Mark Buza during booking.

Having described the scope of totality-of-the-circumstances balancing in exceedingly generous terms, Presiding Justice Kline turns to a logically prior Fourth Amendment question—should the DNA collection from Buza be considered a search under the Fourth Amendment? This definitional issue is a condition precedent to reasonableness balancing in that the state has no burden of showing reasonableness if it does not conduct a “search or seizure” within the meaning of the amendment.

Again, the court reaches the correct conclusion—of course there was a search—but the exposition raises some questions. Presiding Justice Kline wrote that
Nonconsensual extractions of substances that may be used for DNA profiling are “searches” entitled to the protection of the Fourth Amendment. (King, supra, 133 S.Ct. at p. 1969 [buccal swab]; Schmerber v. California (1966) 384 U.S. 757, 767-771 (Schmerber) [blood]; People v. Robinson, supra, 47 Cal.4th at p. 1119 [blood]; Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Assn. (1989) 489 U.S. 602, 616-617 [breathalyzer and urine sample]; Cupp v. Murphy (1973) 412 U.S. 291, 295 [finger nail scrapings].) The physical intrusion involved in the buccal swab procedure used in the present case has been viewed as minimal. (King, at p. 1969.) The collection of the DNA sample, however, is only the first part of the search authorized by the DNA Act; the second occurs when the DNA sample is analyzed and a profile created for use in state and federal DNA databases. The latter search is the true focus of our analysis. (Brackets in original).
Most of this paragraph is gratuitous. Why not stop with the irrefragable proposition that King held that buccal swabbing is a search? Every Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court accepted this premise, and not one maintained that there was one search followed by another search. According to the King majority, "using a buccal swab on the inner tissues of a person's cheek in order to obtain DNA samples is a search" simply because "[v]irtually any intrusion into the human body will work an invasion of cherished personal security that is subject to constitutional scrutiny.” 133 S.Ct. at 1969 (internal quotations, citations, and alteration omitted).  “The ... intrusion [although] negligible ... is still a search as the law defines that term.” Id.

In contrast, whether trawling a database for a DNA match to the DNA profile derived from the sample acquired by the physical intrusion is a “latter search” is an open question. Federal appellate courts have reached different conclusions about it, and the King Court did not discuss it (despite the insistence of King’s counsel at oral argument that DNA analysis and trawling is a search in itself). To be sure, the nature of DNA profiling and trawling is “of central relevance,” King, 133 S.Ct. at 1969—but only on the distinct question of whether the search is reasonable. Id.

Before turning to that question, the Buza II court expressed some sympathy for Justice Scalia’s “piercing” dissent. This position is at odds with Presiding Justice Kline’s description of the Fourth Amendment as always accommodating balancing, since the entire theory of Justice Scalia’s dissent was that the reasonableness of DNA sampling on arrest is not to be determined by weighing individual and state interests, but by a putative categorical rule against certain suspicionless searches

Be that as it may, the Buza II court maintained that King’s “reasons for upholding the Maryland law [are] completely inapplicable to California’s.” That conclusion seems precipitous. There is ample room to debate the value of arrestee sampling and the significance of the differences of the Maryland and California statutes. Indeed, I have written that Justice Kennedy’s reasoning in King is “contrived,” but only because a candid approach to totality balancing (or, preferably in my view, toward creating a new categorical “biometric exception” to the general rule against warrantless searches) has to incorporate the power of DNA to solve cases and deter crimes sooner rather than later (or not at all). 1/

But surely King’s detention-related reasons for DNA testing cannot be dismissed as “completely inapplicable.” For example, Buza II cited the fact that whereas the California law covers all felony arrests, the Maryland law encompasses only arrests for “murder, rape, first-degree assault, kidnaping, arson, sexual assault, and a variety of other serious crimes.” King, 133 S.Ct. at 1967. The supposition that DNA from individuals arrested for nonviolent felonies is less likely to provide a link to an unsolved crime hardly means that the DNA is devoid of investigative value. Car theft is not a violent crime or a burglary, but at least some car thieves leave behind traces of DNA while committing more serious crimes

Furthermore, even the more sensible reasoning that arrestee DNA is, on average, less valuable to the state for some felonies than for others does not distinguish the demands the states made on the defendants in King and Buza. Mark Buza, after all, was caught committing arson—surely a serious crime. Why is the Buza court addressing the law as applied to a hypothetical person at another time? Under established Fourth Amendment doctrine, Buza was justifiably arrested for arson. As such, he lacks standing to assert the rights of individuals arrested for much less serious offenses. If it was constitutional to have compelled King to give a DNA sample—which is what the Supreme Court held—why is not equally constitutional to have ordered Buza to give a DNA sample? The answer cannot be that the Supreme Court in King was confronted a serious felony arrest. The court of appeal in Buza likewise was confronted with a serious felony arrest.

Indeed, the Buza opinion itself backs away from the extreme position that King’s reasoning is “completely inapplicable.” The court announces that it is not actually deciding the fundamental question of “whether these differences require a different resolution of the issue from that of the King majority.” It ends its Fourth Amendment analysis with more of a whimper than a bang, dismissing the entire issue: “Our conclusion that the DNA Act is invalid under article I, section 13, of the California Constitution renders it academic whether the Act is also invalid under the Fourth Amendment.” The court is convinced that the differences “significantly alter the weight of the governmental interests and privacy considerations to be balanced in determining constitutionality under the Fourth Amendment,” but it seems less certain that this alteration truly produces a different result.

To reach a different result, the Buza II court performs its own balancing under an unusually demanding balancing test. The next installment comments on this California balancing.

Note
  1. David H. Kaye, Why So Contrived? DNA Databases After Maryland v. King, Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Vol. 104, No. 3, pp. 535-596, May 2014, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2376467
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