Court Nixes Inmate DNA Testing

A 3-year-old law that requires federal prisoners to give blood samples for the FBI's DNA database was declared unconstitutional Thursday by a federal appeals court.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that requiring the blood samples amounts to an illegal invasion of privacy because they are taken without legal suspicion that the convicts were involved in other crimes.

The San Francisco-based court, the first federal appeals court to address the federal DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act, said that is a violation of inmates' Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches.

The blood samples "violate the Fourth Amendment because they constitute suspicionless searches with the objective of futhering law enforcement purposes," Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote. "Compulsory searches of the bodies of parolees ... require, at a minimum, reasonable suspicion."

The Justice Department did not have immediate comment on the court's 2-1 decision.

The DNA samples are turned over to the FBI, which places analyzes the results and places them in a databank open to law enforcement nationally.

It was not immediately clear whether the decision would apply retroactively, meaning that those who have given blood could have it withdrawn from the databank. In addition, it was too early to say whether new convictions based on the blood samples would survive, said Monica Knox, a deputy public defender of Los Angeles

"That may have to worked out later," Knox said.

She said the government has extracted blood from thousands of inmates and former prisoners on supervised release. She said the decision, if it survives appeal, could also nullify state laws that require the taking of blood from inmates.

"Most states have similar laws," Knox said. "This could gut those."

The court covers Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Idaho, Washington state, Montana, Nevada and Alaska.