WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials in Maryland may continue to collect DNA samples from people charged with violent felonies while the Supreme Court considers whether to hear an appeal on the constitutionality of the practice, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ruled on Monday in a brief order granting a stay of a state court decision.
In April, the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ruled that a state law authorizing DNA collection from people arrested but not yet convicted violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
The case arose from the collection of DNA in 2009 from Alonzo Jay King Jr. after his arrest on assault charges. The DNA profile matched evidence from a 2003 rape, and he was convicted of that crime.
The April decision overturned the rape conviction. “King, as an arrestee, had an expectation of privacy to be free from warrantless searches of his biological material,” Judge Glenn T. Harrell Jr. wrote for the majority.
In dissent, Judge Mary Ellen Barbera wrote that collecting DNA “by rubbing and rotating a cotton swab on the inside of an individual’s cheek” is much less intrusive than searches that have been approved by the Supreme Court, including routine strip searches of people arrested for even minor crimes and held in the general jail population.
Chief Justice Roberts, reciting the usual standards for granting a stay of a lower-court decision, said there was “a reasonable probability” that the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case. The Maryland decision conflicted, he said, with ones from the Virginia Supreme Court and federal appeals courts in Philadelphia andSan Francisco.
He added that collecting DNA from people accused of serious crimes is “an important feature of day-to-day law enforcement practice in approximately half the states and the federal government.”
The Maryland decision had consequences beyond its borders, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, because the samples the state collected might have been provided to a national database maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “The decision renders the database less effective for other states and the federal government,” he wrote.
There was a “fair prospect,” Chief Justice Roberts went on, that the Supreme Court will ultimately reverse the Maryland decision.
In the meantime, he said, the state would suffer irreparable harm if it could not use “a valuable tool for investigating unsolved crimes and thereby helping to remove violent offenders from the general population.”