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Genetic Privacy And The Fourth Amendment: Unregulated Surreptitious Dna Harvesting, Albert E. Scherr

Law Faculty Scholarship

Genetic privacy and police practices have come to the fore in the criminal justice system. Case law and stories in the media document that police are surreptitiously harvesting the DNA of putative suspects. Some sources even indicate that surreptitious data banking may also be in its infancy. Surreptitious harvesting of out-of-body DNA by the police is currently unregulated by the Fourth Amendment. The few courts that have addressed the issue find that the police are free to harvest DNA abandoned by a putative suspect in a public place. Little in the nascent surreptitious harvesting case law suggests that surreptitious data …