Fourth Amendment Commons^™

Privacy And Property: Constitutional Concerns Of Dna Dragnet Testing, E. Wyatt Jones

Honors Projects

DNA dragnets have attracted both public and scholarly criticisms that have yet to be resolved by the Courts. This review will introduce a modern understanding of DNA analysis, a complete introduction to past and present Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, and existing suggestions concerning similar issues in legal scholarship. Considering these contexts, this review concludes that a focus on privacy and property at once, with a particular sensitivity to the inseverable relationship between the two interests, is Constitutionally consistent with precedent and the most workable means of answering the question at hand.

No Longer Innocent Until Proven Guilty: How Ohio Violates The Fourth Amendment Through Familial Dna Searches Of Felony Arrestees, Jordan Mason

Cleveland State Law Review

In 2013, the United States Supreme Court legalized DNA collection of all felony arrestees upon arrest through its decision in Maryland v. King. Since then, the State of Ohio has broadened the use of arrestee DNA by subjecting it to familial DNA searches. Ohio’s practice of conducting familial DNA searches of arrestee DNA violates the Fourth Amendment because arrestees have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information that is extracted from a familial DNA search and it fails both the totality of the circumstances and the special needs tests. Further, these tests go against the intention of the …

People V. Buza: A Step In The Wrong Direction, Emily R. Pincin

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

Biometric Cyberintelligence And The Posse Comitatus Act, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

This Article addresses the rapid growth of what the military and the intelligence community refer to as “biometric-enabled intelligence.” This newly emerging intelligence tool is reliant upon biometric databases—for example, digitalized storage of scanned fingerprints and irises, digital photographs for facial recognition technology, and DNA. This Article introduces the term “biometric cyberintelligence” to more accurately describe the manner in which this new tool is dependent upon cybersurveillance and big data’s massintegrative systems.

This Article argues that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, designed to limit the deployment of federal military resources in the service of domestic policies, will be difficult …

Policing As Administration, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Police agencies should be governed by the same administrative principles that govern other agencies. This simple precept would have significant implications for regulation of police work, in particular the type of suspicionless, group searches and seizures that have been the subject of the Supreme Court's special needs jurisprudence (practices that this Article calls "panvasive"). Under administrative law principles, when police agencies create statute-like policies that are aimed at largely innocent categories of actors-as they do when administering roadblocks, inspection regimes, drug testing programs, DNA sampling programs, and data collection-they should have to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking or a similar democratically …

Policing Criminal Justice Data, Wayne A. Logan, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Government Analysis Of Shed Dna Is A Search Under The Fourth Amendment, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses whether the Fourth Amendment is implicated when police surreptitiously collect and analyze a person’s involuntarily shed DNA.

Law enforcement officers will often obtain shed or abandoned DNA samples from persons who they suspect have committed crimes, but lack sufficient evidence to arrest or detain such persons. When utilizing abandoned or shed DNA for criminal investigative purposes, there are two state actions which arguably trigger Fourth Amendment protection. First, the collection of the biological material which contains a person’s DNA might be considered a search under the amendment. Courts, however, have uniformly rejected this argument. For example, when …

Dna Storage Banks: The Importance Of Preserving Dna Evidence To Allow For Transparency And The Preservation Of Justice, Cristina Martin

Chicago-Kent Law Review

What is the duty to preserve information in today’s society? In order for humanity to evolve, change and flourish in the future, society needs to preserve its information from the past. In the criminal justice field, preservation of evidence has special significance. DNA evidence in particular has become a helpful aid for innocent defendants who have been improperly imprisoned. Over the past twenty years, the number of exonerations of imprisoned criminal defendants has increased dramatically. With the advancement of technology, old, previously untestable or improperly tested DNA evidence will need to be retested. However, most states do not have proper …

Government Analysis Of Shed Dna Is A Search Under The Fourth Amendment, Tracey Maclin

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article addresses whether the Fourth Amendment is implicated when police surreptitiously collect and analyze a person’s involuntarily shed DNA. Law enforcement officers will often obtain shed or abandoned DNA samples from persons who they suspect have committed crimes, but lack sufficient evidence to arrest or detain such persons. When utilizing abandoned or shed DNA for criminal investigative purposes, there are two state actions which arguably trigger Fourth Amendment protection. First, the collection of the biological material which contains a person’s DNA might be considered a search under the amendment. Courts, however, have uniformly rejected this argument. For example, when …

You Have The Right To Be Free From Unwanted Bodily Intrusion--Unless Of Course There Is A Court Order, Tara Laterza

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Blueprint: Critiques Of The Fingerprint And Abandonment Paradigms Utilized To Reject An Expectation Of Privacy In Dna, Avi Goldstein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Maryland V. King: Sacrificing The Fourth Amendment To Build Up The Dna Database, Stephanie B. Noronha

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sacrificing Liberty For Security: North Carolina's Unconstitutional Search And Seizure Of Arrestee Dna, Michael J. Crook

Campbell Law Review

This Comment examines the constitutionality of North Carolina’s DNA Database Act of 2010. The Act is a newly passed expansion of the existing state DNA database, and this Comment argues that North Carolina’s expansion authorizes a constitutionally impermissible, mandatory, suspicionless, and warrantless search and seizure of DNA and the information contained therein. With warrantless searches, the default rule is that they are “per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment— subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.” The Act should not survive Fourth Amendment scrutiny because it does not qualify as a well-delineated exception to the warrant requirement: …

Unraveling The Exclusionary Rule: From Leon To Herring To Robinson - And Back?, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

The Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule began to unravel in United States v. Leon. The facts were compelling. Why exclude reliable physical evidence from trial when it was not the constable who blundered, but “a detached and neutral magistrate” who misjudged whether probable cause was present and issued a search warrant? Later cases applied the exception for “good faith” mistakes to a police officer who, pursuing a grudge against a suspect, arrested and searched him and his truck on the basis of a false and negligent report from a clerk in another county of an outstand­ing arrest warrant. The California Supreme …

Science Fiction And Shed Dna, D. H. Kaye

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Dna Fingerprinting - Justifying The Special Need For The Fourth Amendment's Intrusion Into The Zone Of Privacy, Deborah F. Barfield

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The Fourth Amendment prohibits the government from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures.When claims arise against the government's Fourth Amendment transgressions, usually those claims turn on interpretation of the term "reasonable." Traditionally, a search and seizure conducted under the authority of a judicial warrant for "probable cause" is unquestionably reasonable.In some, albeit very limited, types of searches reasonableness is met with at least "individualized suspicion."When searches intrude into the human body, however, they implicate a person's most deep-rooted expectation of privacy - the right to be left alone.