Federal court to hear pivotal DNA collection case as similar laws spread across country
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Lily Haskell was arrested while attending a peace rally in San Francisco in March 2009.
Police took her fingerprints and swabbed the inside of her cheek to collect a sample of Haskell’s DNA, which was entered into a state database and shared with a federal database run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She was never charged with a crime and was soon free to go.
But her most private, biological data will remain with the state indefinitely.
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All 50 states and the federal government take samples of DNA from anyone convicted of a felony. But in recent years, many states have passed laws allowing police to take DNA samples at arrest – before a suspect is charged with a crime, much less found guilty – and enter them into state-level databases along with the national DNA database run by the FBI.
Though the state-level laws vary in terms of how long the DNA evidence can be kept – some, like California, allow it to be kept permanently, while other states require the information to be deleted if a suspect is not charged or found innocent – they all raise concerns about privacy and due process, since an individual’s DNA can be taken without consent or judicial approval.
“Now my genetic information is stored indefinitely in a government database, simply because I was exercising my right to speak out,” Haskell, now a plaintiff in a legal challenge to the California law, said in a statement.
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