Maryland v. King: A Digression on Ellipses, Actual Innocence, and Dr. Mengele

New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak recently tweaked the noses of the justices who upheld the constitutionality of routinely taking DNA from individuals arrested of violent crimes and burglary. [1]

The Court’s opinion, penned by Justice Kennedy, enumerated the arguable benefits of routine DNA collection before conviction, concluding with with the observation that “[f]inally, in the interests of justice, the identification of an arrestee as the perpetrator of some heinous crime may have the salutary effect of freeing a person wrongfully imprisoned for the same offense.” To support this conclusion, Justice Kennedy added a quotation from the important and gripping book Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted [2]. As quoted in the justice's opinion, the authors of Actual Innocence -- Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer -- had written that “[P]rompt [DNA] testing . . . would speed up apprehension of criminals before they commit additional crimes, and prevent the grotesque detention of . . . innocent people.”

I. Toward More Punctility

Mr. Liptak noted that this quotation was not “especially punctilious.” One might think that the problem is that the quotation speaks to preventing erroneous convictions, whereas the sentence it is supposed to support is about "freeing a person wrongfully imprisoned." (Emphasis added.) But Mr. Liptak's point, which turns out to be related, was that “[t]hose first three dots covered a lot of ground. They took the place of more than six sentences and suggested a different point than the one the authors were making.”

What exactly was that little ellipsis hiding? To be particularly punctilious, let’s look at the preceding paragraph, all the omitted words, and a few that follow. This material reads as follows (with the quoted part highlighted):

All wrongfully convicted people take the lash of punishment for someone else's crime; that is the very definition of their predicament. Far too often, they are surrogates for serial criminals and killers, as in California, where Kevin Green carried the weight for a crime by Gerald Parker, who for twenty years stood unprosecuted for five murders. In Oklahoma, Robert Miller was condemned to die for murdering and raping two elderly women before DNA testing put a man named Ronnie Lott in their houses, as well as in the homes of several other women who survived his rapes. In Chicago, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez were sentenced to death for killing Jeanine Nicarico, although it turned out that Brian Dugan admitted to murdering Jeanine and five others, including children, during sexual assaults. In North Carolina, Ronald Cotton was cleared of two rapes committed by a man tied to eight others. In Virginia, David Vasquez, a borderline mentally retarded man, pleaded guilty to raping a woman and hanging her from a pipe. Vasquez said he was innocent but copped a plea to avoid the death penalty. The time he served belonged to Timothy Spencer, who raped and murdered not only the victim in the Vasquez case, but three other women, all of them hanged. And because Spencer ultimately was sent to death row for the murders, he was not prosecuted for eight other rapes in which he was the prime suspect.

Each year, the technology for linking and solving these kinds of crimes gets faster and cheaper. Computers can sort through data banks of DNA samples with dazzling speed and connect identical profiles among far-flung atrocities. If a genetic profile of a criminal is already lodged in a data bank, identifying him is a no-brainer. Even if a pattern of crimes can't be tagged to a known criminal, prompt testing will prevent the lengthy detention of innocent suspects and immediately put the police back to the task of finding the real perpetrator. The failure to take full advantage of this technology, both for solving crimes and freeing the innocent, is a national scandal. Current investigative approaches must change.

Typically, DNA testing of evidence is done only after a suspect has been apprehended—and then takes two or three months. Hundreds of thousands of rape kits from unsolved cases are thrown out or sit in dead storage for years with no effort made by the authorities to run DNA tests, squandering opportunities to identify serial offenders and clear the wrongly convicted, such as Kevin Green. If crime scene materials were tested and catalogued immediately, one case could be linked quickly to others. Since a forensic DNA test can be completed in two or three days, crime laboratories could be given the resources to finish a case within a week. This would speed up apprehension of criminals before they commit additional crimes, and prevent the grotesque detention of thousands of innocent people.

And that goes not only for rapes and homicides but for burglaries, robberies, assaults—any kind of incident in which a criminal may have left a trace of skin, saliva, hair, or any biological evidence.

The second paragraph on "prompt testing" is a little confusing. How will "prompt testing" of rape kits "prevent the lengthy detention of innocent suspects and immediately put the police back to the task of finding the real perpetrator" when there is no match to a convicted offender in the database? Sticking to cold hits, there will be more of them if arrestee DNA profiles are placed in the database along with the profiles of convicted offenders and are periodically searched against the database of profiles from unsolved crimes. Statements from the matching individuals might exonerate some convicted offenders (for whom post-conviction DNA testing has been unavailable or ambiguous under the circumstances of the cases). Furthermore, these cold hits might prevent the arrests and subsequent convictions of some innocent suspects (who do not receive prompt DNA testing or whose exclusion as the source of the crime-scene DNA is not sufficient, under the circumstances of the case, to demonstrate their innocence).

The next paragraph, however, makes it clear that the "prompt testing" demanded by the the authors of Actual Innocence is only the prompt testing of crime-scene and victim samples. They take no position (at least not here) on the value of "prompt testing" of arrestees, and one of them, Peter Neufeld, told Mr. Liptak that all three "never endorsed arrestee databases.” [1]

Given that Actual Innocence did not explicitly endorse arrestee sampling, how should the opinion have used some of the book's prose? How about a parenthetical phrase -- the darling of the ever punctilious Bluebook (the legal style manual so dear to student law review editors). The paragraph should have read:

Finally, in the interests of justice, the identification of an arrestee as the perpetrator of some heinous crime may have the salutary effect of freeing a person wrongfully imprisoned for the same offense. "[P]rompt [DNA] testing . . . would speed up apprehension of criminals before they commit additional crimes, and prevent the grotesque detention of . . . innocent people." J. Dwyer, P. Neufeld, & B. Scheck, Actual Innocence 245 (2000) (referring to the importance of prompt testing of crime-scene samples).

II. Arrestee DNA and Resolving Unsolved Cases

So I have to agree with Mr. Liptak. The citation lacks (parenthetical) punctility. But is it not at least consistent with the logic of the paragraphs from which it quotes? To achieve maximum exonerations and to avoid apprehension of the wrong people for unsolved crimes, should not DNA profiles from arrestees go into the databases for subsequent searches against crime-scene samples along with those of convicted offenders?

Well, not necessarily. It could be argued that arrestees are just gravy -- that if there is not enough money to fund lavishly three sources of samples, crime-scene samples and convicted-offender samples should come first. Interestingly, a brief of "14 Scholars of Forensic Evidence" (that is, law professors) filed on behalf of Mr. King claimed that arrestee sampling exacerbates backlogs and is not necessary to exonerate the innocent. Should a court therefore hold a DNA database law unconstitutional on the ground that a state should be spending more money on one part of the system than another? What if the state then turns around and spends more money on the parts the court, guided by this scholarship, thought more important? Should the court function as a kind of equitable master periodically reviewing funding decisions, average processing times for crime-scene samples, and the number and training of the investigators collecting DNA from crime-scenes? These things, among others, bear on how well the system works in identifying true offenders, but do they have the necessary clarity and susceptibility to judicial supervision to be dividing lines of constitutional magnitude?

I doubt it. As long the legislature pursues a reasonable combination of the essentials required of a database for investigating offenses in which DNA evidence can be recovered, courts should not vitiate the legislative judgment on the ground that the system could be realigned to be still more effective. Courts faithfully interpret the mandate of the Fourth Amendment when they uphold measures that are not unreasonably invasive of personal security. That these measures could be made more efficacious is important in formulating and implementing public policy, but it cannot be the basis for a ruling of unconstitutionality.

III. Dr. Mengele Comes to the Databanks

The Court's reliance on Actual Innocence prompts a final thought (for now).  Immediately after the paragraphs that I quoted in full, the authors add that

No matter whose privacy is at stake, data banks full of genetic information can be dangerous, particularly when the samples disproportionately come from black and brown men. Modern-day Mengeles, in search of evidence for master-race theories, would find data bases irresistible in the quest for a genetic link to criminality. A simple reform could slam the door on such eugenic inquiries. Any leftover blood, tissue, or DNA should be discarded once a profile has been stored.

This passage is not a model of clarity. I do not say this because I disagree with the conclusion. On the contrary, I have written that the case for indefinite sample retention is weak. [3] My concern is with the poorly woven strands of the argument.

Let us remember who Josef Mengele was and what he did. As an SS physician, assigned to the Auschwitz concentration camp, "with full license to maim or kill his subjects, Mengele performed a broad range of agonizing and often lethal experiments with Jewish and Roma ('Gypsy') twins, most of them children. ... Mengele firmly endorsed the doctrine of National Socialist racial theory and engaged in a wide spectrum of experiments which aimed to illustrate the lack of resistance among Jews or Roma to various diseases. He also attempted to demonstrate the 'degeneration' of Jewish and 'Gypsy' blood through the documentation of physical oddities and the collection and harvesting of tissue samples and body parts. Many of his 'test subjects' died as a result of the experimentation or were murdered in order to facilitate post-mortem examination." [4]

What would Mengele do with the DNA samples in a law enforcement repository (were he given access to one, in violation of the laws governing many of them)? Look for some association between the genes of all the individuals in the database and a comparison group of presumably law-abiding individuals? Suppose, contrary to previous research, he found some plausible relationship between a genotype and criminality. Might he then discover that this genotype exists in a larger proportion of the "black and brown men" convicted of crimes than in the men of his favored "master race"? How does the disproportionate representation of the former groups in the criminal databanks make this outcome more likely -- if that is what "particularly dangerous" refers to?

This is not to deny that genetic arguments for racism -- no matter how contrived -- will appeal to some people. There are, by way of comparison, Holocaust deniers and plenty of people willing to dismiss evolution as merely "a theory." But the people who would believe the resurrected Mengele of Actual Innocence hardly need more pseudo-science to convince them that "black and brown men" are genetically inferior. That DNA samples should be destroyed because a Mengele could use them to demonstrate the racial inferiority of some groups seems like one of weakest arguments for sample destruction.

In any event, there is a real connection between Mengele and DNA evidence. Mengele eluded capture for 34 years, from 1945 until his death in 1979. He was buried as "Wolfgang Gerhard" near Sao Pãolo. In 1985, the corpse was exhumed and the remains identified as Mengele. In 1992, DNA evidence confirmed this conclusion. [4]

References

1. Adam Liptak, Cited by a Justice, But Feeling Less Than Honored, N.Y. Times, June 11, 2013, at A15.

2. Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, & Jim Dwyer, Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted (2000).

3. David H. Kaye, Behavioral Genetics Research and Criminal DNA Databanks, 69 Law & Contemp. Probs. 259 (2006).

4. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia: Josef Mengele http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/?ModuleId=10005143. Accessed June 13, 2013.

Maryland v. King No. 3: Bertillonage as Precedent

There are lots of criticisms that one can make of the majority opinion in Maryland v. King -- and even more that apply to the dissent -- but, contrary to one commentator, I do not think that the Court's reference to the use of anthropometrics as employed in the late 1800s and early 1900s for authenticating the identities of prisoners is particularly problematic. The Court wrote:

Beginning in 1887, some police adopted more exacting means to identify arrestees, using the system of precise physical measurements pioneered by the French anthro­pologist Alphonse Bertillon. Bertillon identification con­sisted of 10 measurements of the arrestee’s body, along with a “scientific analysis of the features of the face and an exact anatomical localization of the various scars, marks, &c., of the body.” Defense of the Bertillon System, N.Y. Times, Jan. 20, 1896, p. 3. “[W]hen a prisoner was brought in, his photograph was taken according to the Bertillon system, and his body measurements were then made. The measurements were made . . . and noted down on the back of a card or a blotter, and the photograph of the prisoner was expected to be placed on the card. This card, therefore, furnished both the likeness and description of the prisoner, and was placed in the rogues’ gallery, and copies were sent to various cities where similar records were kept.” People ex rel. Jones v. Diehl, 53 App. Div. 645, 646, 65 N. Y. S. 801, 802 (1900). As in the present case, the point of taking this information about each ar­restee was not limited to verifying that the proper name was on the indictment. These procedures were used to “facilitate the recapture of escaped prisoners,” to aid “the investigation of their past records and personal history,” and “to preserve the means of identification for . . . future supervision after discharge.” Hodgeman v. Olsen, 86 Wash. 615, 619, 150 P. 1122, 1124 (1915); see also McGovern v. Van Riper, 137 N. J. Eq. 24, 33–34, 43 A. 2d 514, 519 (Ch. 1945) (“[C]riminal identification is said to have two main purposes: (1) The identification of the accused as the person who committed the crime for which he is being held; and, (2) the identification of the accused as the same person who has been previously charged with, or convicted of, other offenses against the criminal law”).

After Jake Sherkow, a Fellow at Stanford's Center for the Law and Biosciences, suggested that this recounting of legal history was an "appeal to the truly ugly portion of nineteenth century criminology" and that Bertillonage was "proto-eugenics," he and I corresponded about the value of these measurements for biometric authentication and their putative connection to the eugenics movement. We pretty much converged in our understanding of these matters (see http://blogs.law.stanford.edu/lawandbiosciences/2013/06/11/maryland-v-king-corrections-department-david-kaye-on-bertillonage/), but I think we still disagree on the wisdom of the Court's including a reference to the legal history in its opinion.

I would agree that Justice Kennedy could have made the same point solely with early opinions on the propriety of fingerprinting. However, anthropometrics and photography contributed mightily to that line of cases. The justice began his discussion of fingerprinting with United States v. Kelly, 55 F. 2d 67 (2d Cir. 1932), presenting it as "the seminal case." In fact, it was a part of a long series of cases. E.g., Downs v. Swann, 73 A. 653 (Md. 1909); David H. Kaye, A Fourth Amendment Theory for Arrestee DNA and Other Biometric Databases, 15 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 1095, 1098 n.9 (2013); http://for-sci-law-now.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-judicial-reception-of-acquiring.html. But see with Wayne A. Logan, Policing Identity, 92 B.U. L. Rev. 1561, 1580 (2012) (arguing that Kelly represented a major shift in the caselaw)..

Ignoring judicial approval of anthropometrics and photography therefore would have been ahistorical, especially considering that cases such as Downs saw fingerprints as part of a combined system -- in modern jargon, a multibiometric authentication system. And that is what DNA and fingerprints are today.

Of course, it is not all they are. Both fingerprints and DNA also serve the police intelligence function of associating individuals to crime scenes. The dissenting four justices believe that it is unconstitutional to take arrestee DNA to use it in this manner. I shall consider their reasoning and rhetoric later.

Maryland v. King: Interlude

The more I ruminate on the opinions in Maryland v. King, the more I find the dissenting opinion irritating and the majority opinion disappointing. But explaining precisely why is not so easy. Meanwhile, I can recommend the following early but penetrating comments on the opinions:

• Hank Greely, Maryland v. King - The Coming California Sequels, Law and Biosciences Blog, June 8, 2013
• ----- , The Supreme Court Decision in Maryland v. King, Law and Biosciences Blog, June 3, 2013
• Richard Lempert, Maryland v. King: An Unfortunate Supreme Court Decision on the Collection of DNA Samples, Brookings Up Front, June 6, 2013
  

Update: see also

• Sherry F. Colb, The Road to Justice Scalia Is Paved With (Some) Intentions: The Supreme Court Decides Maryland v. King, Verdict, June 12, 2013

Maryland v. King No. 2: Was There a Search?

In anticipation of the Supreme Court’s review of Maryland v. King, I proposed that a suitable opinion on routine pre-conviction DNA collection would require the Court to

evaluate the actual interests implicated by preconviction searches, properly defined; articulate the appropriate framework for evaluating the reasonableness of warrantless searches in general; and attend to the complexities in applying that framework to the biology of DNA identification tests and to the limited information recorded in DNA databases.  An opinion that accomplishes these tasks should supply not only a truly “considered analysis” of the constitutionality of DNA-BC but also much needed guidance on the limits of totality balancing in all Fourth Amendment cases.

David H. Kaye, On the “Considered Analysis” of DNA Collection Before Conviction, 60 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. 104 (2013).

The Court now has spoken. Justice Kennedy, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Breyer, and Alito, wrote an opinion upholding Maryland’s law as constitutionally reasonable. Their opinion lists—with approval—all the colorable reasons a state could have for enacting such a law. Justices Scalia, joined by Justices Ginsberg, Kagan, and Sotomayor, correctly but scathingly responded that the Maryland legislature was not really pursuing all these goals in enacting and implementing its law.

From the standpoint of developing more coherent Fourth Amendment doctrine, both opinions have major limitations. The majority opinion, I shall argue, does little to provide the much needed guidance as to when totality balancing applies. The dissenting opinion, on the other hand, adopts a clearer rule but ignores the reasons for the rule (beyond a contested reading of the history of the Fourth Amendment).

The threshold question in King, as in any Fourth Amendment case, is whether a search occurred. The issue was not really in dispute. As the majority opinion points out, cases decided under the “reasonable expectation of privacy” rubric of Katz v. United States had held that requiring an individual to expel air from deep within his lungs, to submit to a blood draw, and to have debris gently scrapped from beneath a fingernail all have been deemed searches. Scraping the inside of the cheek falls in the same category. See also David H. Kaye, The Constitutionality of DNA Sampling on Arrest, 10 Cornell J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 455 (2001).

More recently, the Court has been applying an analysis more closely related to the common law of trespass to decide whether particular information-gathering practices are searches. In United States v. Jones, a majority held that affixing an object—a GPS transmitter—to personal property—a car—was a search even if did not invade a reasonable expectation of privacy. In Florida v. Jardines, a different majority held that bringing a drug-detecting dog onto the porch of a house to sniff was a search on the basis of a similar trespass-like theory.

In both cases, Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion, paying little respect to the previously established Katz standard. In King, he did not discuss the issue, but at the oral argument, he applied the same trespass-ish analysis. When counsel for King referred to the reasonable expectation of privacy in genomic information, Justice Scalia suggested that the nature of the information was irrelevant because “You have a physical intrusion. You — you pull a guy's cheek apart and stick a — a swab into his mouth. That's a search — a reasonable expectation of privacy or not.”

The trespass-to-the-person notion is sufficient for disposing of the question in King itself, but the Maryland Court of Appeals used a more complex two-search theory. It claimed that “The first search is the actual swab of the inside of King's mouth and the second is the analysis of the DNA sample thus obtained, a step required to produce the DNA profile.” No justice endorsed this bifurcation. The bodily-invasion rationale was sufficient under both Katz and Jones-Jardines..

Stepping back from the precise facts in King, it is interesting to consider how the state could have responded if the dissenting view that the search was impermissible had prevailed. Could Maryland simply have adopted a less invasive mode of DNA collection, then argued that it was not undertaking a search at all? For example, would having a suspect merely touch a sticky pad (and thereby deposit enough cells for DNA profiling) constitute a search under the "physical intrusion onto the person" approach emphasized by Justice Scalia?

One might answer by paraphrasing the dissent’s “doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to [present] their [fingers] for royal inspection.” But that is no answer. These proud men also might not have been keen on sitting still for a photograph or a fingerprint for the King's men; yet, the dissent distinguished taking mug shots from collecting DNA samples “because that is not a Fourth Amendment search at all.” As for fingerprinting, the dissent stated that “our cases provide no ready answer to that question.”

Since photographing is not a search that triggers the Fourth Amendment’s protections, police should be free to use facial recognition software to check whether previous arrestees happen to match photos from a crime-scene (such as the Boston Marathon bombing)—even though they have no basis to suspect the many arrestees of that crime. But if fingerprints are the product of a suspicionless search, the same theory does not apply, and the Court would have to decide whether it is reasonable to trawl a database of latent prints from crime scenes to produce evidence against an arrestee. And if the dissenting Justices would accept the use of fingerprints to connect arrestees to unrelated crimes, why do the majority and the dissent disagree on the reasonableness of DNA collection and trawling? To answer these questions, we must move from the issue of defining the government activity that amounts to a search to the problem of evaluating the reasonableness of searches. As the majority observed, “To say that the Fourth Amendment applies here is the beginning point, not the end of the analysis.”

Maryland v. King No. 1: Quick Thoughts

After the oral argument in Maryland v. King, I wrote that "[i]n the end, my money is on a 5-4 (or maybe 6-3) decision for the state." Today the Supreme Court split into the two main camps I had described. The Court, in a rather staid opinion by Justice Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Breyer and Thomas, upheld the Maryland law that requires individuals arrested and detained for major crimes to submit DNA samples that can be checked against a database of DNA profiles from unsolved crimes. Justice Scalia, wrote a bitter and sarcastic dissent for himself and Justices Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor.

Although the question is more delicately balanced than either opinion indicates, the majority reached the correct result. To be sure, not every state wants to establish arrestee DNA databases, and there is ample room to debate whether they represent the best use of scarce resources. But the constitution leaves the option open.

The contrary argument advanced by the dissent is that the Fourth Amendment always prohibits suspicionless entries into the body to investigate a crime. The dissenters would brand these searches as “unreasonable”—no matter how minor the intrusion on the person and no matter how much the program advances the welfare of the public. Justice Scalia tartly concludes that “the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would [not] have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

Perhaps not, but if the only individual interest that demands protection is the slight discomfort of swabbing the inside of a cheek, a state could collect the DNA another way, perhaps by having the arrestee place his fingers not just on a fingerprint card, but also on a sticky pad.

Ultimately, a more sensitive understanding of the Fourth Amendment is required. It should be constitutionally reasonable to acquire, analyze, store, and search biometric data without a warrant and without individualized suspicion when five conditions hold: (1) the person legitimately is detained (or the data are acquired without confining the individual); (2) the process of collecting the data is not significantly physically or mentally invasive; (3) collection proceeds according to rules that prevent arbitrary selection of individuals; (4) the biometric data are used only to establish or authenticate the true identity of a given individual or to link individuals to crime scenes; and (5) the authentication or intelligence-gathering system is valid, reliable, and effective.

Fingerprinting of arrestees satisfies these conditions. So does photography, iris scanning, and noninvasive forms of DNA collection. The sticking point for many people is that the entirety of one’s DNA contains much more sensitive information. That is surely a legitimate concern, and it is why condition (4) is critical. Any system of DNA databanks for law enforcement—before or after conviction—must have rigorous safeguards to ensure access is confined strictly to biometric data that carry no deep threat to privacy.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not analyze the issue in terms of a well-defined exception to the general rule of warrants and individual suspicion. The five justices in the majority engaged in what the dissent called "free-form" balancing—an approach that, in other circumstances, could be used to balance away important individual interests. Nevertheless, the entire Court agreed that DNA sampling on arrest—a procedure adopted by most of the states, the federal government, and many other technologically advanced countries—“will have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes.” Although the dissent correctly perceived that this is the main purpose of the Maryland law, the majority also emphasized the advantages of knowing whether an arrestee is implicated in other crimes in making decisions about pretrial detention.

The clash between the majority and minority in Maryland v. King leaves many questions unresolved:

● Just how long after an arrest must the state wait to collect the DNA? Maryland waits at least until formal charges are read at a judicial proceeding known as an arraignment.

● If an arrestee’s DNA is a near miss to a profile in the unsolved crimes database, can this fact be used to focus the investigation on his parents, children, or siblings who might be full matches? Maryland forbids such “familial searching.”

● May a state collect DNA from people arrested for more minor matters? The dissent complained that the Court’s logic would allow this, but the “free-form balancing” is a vague standard.

● What if future DNA genetic research overturns the Court’s characterization of the DNA features used for identification today as “junk”?

● If the dissent is right that “[n]early one-third of Americans will be arrested for some offense by age 23” (and if what is left unstated—that disproportionately many of these youths will be from African-American, Latino, and other minority groups”—also is true), would it not be fairer to collect DNA profiles from everyone?

One thing is clear. The legislatures and courts are not finished with the constitutional and policy questions surrounding DNA databases.

References

• Maryland v. King, No. 12-207 (U.S. June 3, 2013).
• Kaye, David H. 2013. "A Fourth Amendment Theory for Arrestee DNA and Other Biometric Databases." University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 15(4): 1095-1160.

Note: A condensed version of this posting appears in the BBC News blog, Viewpoints: Supreme Court and DNA Samples, BBC News: US and Canada, June 3, 2013.