Maryland v. King

569 U.S. 435

Case Year: 2013

Case Ruling: 5-4, Reversed

Opinion Justice: Kennedy

FACTS

In 2003, a man concealing his face broke into a woman’s home in Salisbury, Maryland, and raped her. Police were unable to identify, much less apprehend, the assailant based on any detailed description or other evidence, but they did obtain from the victim a sample of the perpetrator’s DNA.

Six years later, in 2009, police in Wicomico County, Maryland, arrested Alonzo King and charged him with assault for threatening a group of people with a shotgun. As a routine part of the booking procedure for serious crimes, a Maryland law, known the DNA Collection Act, allows law enforcement officials to collect a DNA sample by applying a cotton swab or filter paper—known as a buccal swab—to the inside of the suspect’s cheeks. King’s DNA sample was found to match the DNA taken from the Salisbury rape victim.

The state tried and convicted King for the rape. Additional DNA samples were taken from him and introduced in the rape trial, but it seems clear that it was the sample taken at the time he was booked in 2009 that led police to link him to the rape.

On review, the highest court in Maryland set aside King’s rape conviction on the ground that the portions of the state’s DNA Act authorizing DNA collection from felony arrestees were unconstitutional. In the context of this case, the court held that taking King’s DNA when he was booked for the 2009 charge was an unreasonable search of the person.

 

JUSTICE KENNEDY DELIVERED THE OPINION OF THE COURT.

Both federal and state courts have reached differing conclusions as to whether the Fourth Amendment prohibits the collection and analysis of a DNA sample from persons arrested, but not yet convicted, on felony charges. This Court granted certiorari to address the question. . . .

The advent of DNA technology is one of the most significant scientific advancements of our era. The full potential for use of genetic markers in medicine and science is still being explored, but the utility of DNA identification in the criminal justice system is already undisputed. Since the first use of forensic DNA analysis to catch a rapist and murderer in England in 1986, law enforcement, the defense bar, and the courts have acknowledged DNA testing’s “unparalleled ability both to exonerate the wrongly convicted and to identify the guilty. It has the potential to significantly improve both the criminal justice system and police investigative practices.” . . .

All 50 States require the collection of DNA from felony convicts, and respondent does not dispute the validity of that practice. Twenty-eight States and the Federal Government have adopted laws similar to the Maryland Act authorizing the collection of DNA from some or all arrestees. Although those statutes vary in their particulars, such as what charges require a DNA sample, their similarity means that this case implicates more than the specific Maryland law. At issue is a standard, expanding technology already in widespread use throughout the Nation . . .

Although the DNA swab procedure used here presents a question the Court has not yet addressed, the framework for deciding the issue is well established. The Fourth Amendment, binding on the States by the Fourteenth Amendment, provides that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” It can be agreed that using a buccal swab on the inner tissues of a person’s cheek in order to obtain DNA samples is a search. Virtually any “intrusio[n] into the human body,” Schmerber v. California(1966), will work an invasion of “ ‘cherished personal security’ that is subject to constitutional scrutiny.” Court has applied the Fourth Amendment to police efforts to draw blood, scraping an arrestee’s fingernails to obtain trace evidence, and even to “a breathalyzer test, which generally requires the production of alveolar or ‘deep lung’ breath for chemical analysis.” Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Assn. (1989).

A buccal swab is a far more gentle process than a venipuncture to draw blood. It involves but a light touch on the inside of the cheek; and although it can be deemed a search within the body of the arrestee, it requires no “surgical intrusions beneath the skin.” The fact than an intrusion is negligible is of central relevance to determining reasonableness, although it is still a search as the law defines that term.

To say that the Fourth Amendment applies here is the beginning point, not the end of the analysis. “[T]he Fourth Amendment’s proper function is to constrain, not against all intrusions as such, but against intrusions which are not justified in the circumstances, or which are made in an improper manner.” “As the text of the Fourth Amendment indicates, the ultimate measure of the constitutionality of a governmental search is ‘reasonableness.’ ” Vernonia School Dist. 47J v. Acton (1995). In giving content to the inquiry whether an intrusion is reasonable, the Court has preferred “some quantum of individualized suspicion . . . [as] a prerequisite to a constitutional search or seizure. But the Fourth Amendment imposes no irreducible requirement of such suspicion.”

In some circumstances, such as “[w]hen faced with special law enforcement needs, diminished expectations of privacy, minimal intrusions, or the like, the Court has found that certain general, or individual, circumstances may render a warrantless search or seizure reasonable.” Those circumstances diminish the need for a warrant, either because “the public interest is such that neither a warrant nor probable cause is required” or because an individual is already on notice, for instance because of his employment, or the conditions of his release from government custody that some reasonable police intrusion on his privacy is to be expected. The need for a warrant is perhaps least when the search involves no discretion that could properly be limited by the “interpo[lation of] a neutral magistrate between the citizen and the law enforcement officer.”

The instant case can be addressed with this background. The Maryland DNA Collection Act provides that, in order to obtain a DNA sample, all arrestees charged with serious crimes must furnish the sample on a buccal swab applied, as noted, to the inside of the cheeks. The arrestee is already in valid police custody for a serious offense supported by probable cause. The DNA collection is not subject to the judgment of officers. . . . “Indeed, in light of the standardized nature of the tests and the minimal discretion vested in those charged with administering the program, there are virtually no facts for a neutral magistrate to evaluate.” Here, the search effected by the buccal swab of respondent falls within the category of cases this Court has analyzed by reference to the proposition that the “touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness, not individualized suspicion.”

Even if a warrant is not required, a search is not beyond Fourth Amendment scrutiny; for it must be reasonable in its scope and manner of execution. Urgent government interests are not a license for indiscriminate police behavior. To say that no warrant is required is merely to acknowledge that “rather than employing a per se rule of unreasonableness, we balance the privacy-related and law enforcement-related concerns to determine if the intrusion was reasonable.” This application of “traditional standards of reasonableness” requires a court to weigh “the promotion of legitimate governmental interests” against “the degree to which [the search] intrudes upon an individual’s privacy.” An assessment of reasonableness to determine the lawfulness of requiring this class of arrestees to provide a DNA sample is central to the instant case.

The legitimate government interest served by the Maryland DNA Collection Act is one that is well established: the need for law enforcement officers in a safe and accurate way to process and identify the persons and possessions they must take into custody. It is beyond dispute that “probable cause provides legal justification for arresting a person suspected of crime, and for a brief period of detention to take the administrative steps incident to arrest.” . . .

The “routine administrative procedure[s] at a police station house incident to booking and jailing the suspect” derive from different origins and have different constitutional justifications than, say, the search of a place; for the search of a place not incident to an arrest depends on the “fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place.” The interests are further different when an individual is formally processed into police custody. Then “the law is in the act of subjecting the body of the accused to its physical dominion.” When probable cause exists to remove an individual from the normal channels of society and hold him in legal custody, DNA identification plays a critical role in serving those interests.

First, “[i]n every criminal case, it is known and must be known who has been arrested and who is being tried.” An individual’s identity is more than just his name or Social Security number, and the government’s interest in identification goes beyond ensuring that the proper name is typed on the indictment . . .

A suspect’s criminal history is a critical part of his identity that officers should know when processing him for detention. It is a common occurrence that “[p]eople detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals. Hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh was stopped by a state trooper who noticed he was driving without a license plate . . . One of the terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks was stopped and ticketed for speeding just two days before hijacking Flight 93.” Police already seek this crucial identifying information. They use routine and accepted means as varied as comparing the suspect’s booking photograph to sketch artists’ depictions of persons of interest, showing his mugshot to potential witnesses, and of course making a computerized comparison of the arrestee’s fingerprints against electronic databases of known criminals and unsolved crimes. In this respect the only difference between DNA analysis and the accepted use of fingerprint databases is the unparalleled accuracy DNA provides . . .

A DNA profile is useful to the police because it gives them a form of identification to search the records already in their valid possession. In this respect the use of DNA for identification is no different than matching an arrestee’s face to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect; or matching tattoos to known gang symbols to reveal a criminal affiliation; or matching the arrestee’s fingerprints to those recovered from a crime scene. DNA is another metric of identification used to connect the arrestee with his or her public persona, as reflected in records of his or her actions that are available to the police . . .

Second, law enforcement officers bear a responsibility for ensuring that the custody of an arrestee does not create inordinate “risks for facility staff, for the existing detainee population, and for a new detainee.” DNA identification can provide untainted information to those charged with detaining suspects and detaining the property of any felon. For these purposes officers must know the type of person whom they are detaining, and DNA allows them to make critical choices about how to proceed . . .

Third, looking forward to future stages of criminal prosecution, “the Government has a substantial interest in ensuring that persons accused of crimes are available for trials.” A person who is arrested for one offense but knows that he has yet to answer for some past crime may be more inclined to flee the instant charges, lest continued contact with the criminal justice system expose one or more other serious offenses. For example, a defendant who had committed a prior sexual assault might be inclined to flee on a burglary charge, knowing that in every State a DNA sample would be taken from him after his conviction on the burglary charge that would tie him to the more serious charge of rape. In addition to subverting the administration of justice with respect to the crime of arrest, this ties back to the interest in safety; for a detainee who absconds from custody presents a risk to law enforcement officers, other detainees, victims of previous crimes, witnesses, and society at large.

Fourth, an arrestee’s past conduct is essential to an assessment of the danger he poses to the public, and this will inform a court’s determination whether the individual should be released on bail. “The government’s interest in preventing crime by arrestees is both legitimate and compelling.” DNA identification of a suspect in a violent crime provides critical information to the police and judicial officials in making a determination of the arrestee’s future dangerousness . . .

Finally, in the interests of justice, the identification of an arrestee as the perpetrator of some heinous crime may have the salutary effect of freeing a person wrongfully imprisoned for the same offense. “[P]rompt [DNA] testing . . . would speed up apprehension of criminals before they commit additional crimes, and prevent the grotesque detention of . . . innocent people.” . . .

DNA identification represents an important advance in the techniques used by law enforcement to serve legitimate police concerns for as long as there have been arrests, concerns the courts have acknowledged and approved for more than a century. Law enforcement agencies routinely have used scientific advancements in their standard procedures for the identification of arrestees. . . .

By the middle of the 20th century, it was considered “elementary that a person in lawful custody may be required to submit to photographing and fingerprinting as part of routine identification processes.”

DNA identification is an advanced technique superior to fingerprinting in many ways, so much so that to insist on fingerprints as the norm would make little sense to either the forensic expert or a layperson. The additional intrusion upon the arrestee’s privacy beyond that associated with fingerprinting is not significant, and DNA is a markedly more accurate form of identifying arrestees. A suspect who has changed his facial features to evade photographic identification or even one who has undertaken the more arduous task of altering his fingerprints cannot escape the revealing power of his DNA . . .

The respondent’s primary objection to this analogy is that DNA identification is not as fast as fingerprinting, and so it should not be considered to be the 21st-century equivalent. But rapid analysis of fingerprints is itself of recent vintage. The FBI’s vaunted Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) was only “launched on July 28, 1999. Prior to this time, the processing of . . . fingerprint submissions was largely a manual, labor-intensive process, taking weeks or months to process a single submission.” . . .

New technology will only further improve its speed and therefore its effectiveness. And, as noted above, actual release of a serious offender as a routine matter takes weeks or months in any event. By identifying not only who the arrestee is but also what other available records disclose about his past to show who he is, the police can ensure that they have the proper person under arrest and that they have made the necessary arrangements for his custody; and, just as important, they can also prevent suspicion against or prosecution of the innocent.

In sum, there can be little reason to question “the legitimate interest of the government in knowing for an absolute certainty the identity of the person arrested, in knowing whether he is wanted elsewhere, and in ensuring his identification in the event he flees prosecution.” . . .

By comparison to this substantial government interest and the unique effectiveness of DNA identification, the intrusion of a cheek swab to obtain a DNA sample is a minimal one. True, a significant government interest does not alone suffice to justify a search. The government interest must outweigh the degree to which the search invades an individual’s legitimate expectations of privacy. In considering those expectations in this case, however, the necessary predicate of a valid arrest for a serious offense is fundamental . . . .

The reasonableness of any search must be considered in the context of the person’s legitimate expectations of privacy. For example, when weighing the invasiveness of urinalysis of high school athletes, the Court noted that “[l]egitimate privacy expectations are even less with regard to student athletes. . . . Public school locker rooms, the usual sites for these activities, are not notable for the privacy they afford.” Likewise, the Court has used a context-specific benchmark inapplicable to the public at large when “the expectations of privacy of covered employees are diminished by reason of their participation in an industry that is regulated pervasively,” or when “the ‘operational realities of the workplace’ may render entirely reasonable certain work-related intrusions by supervisors and co-workers that might be viewed as unreasonable in other contexts.” . . .

The expectations of privacy of an individual taken into police custody “necessarily [are] of a diminished scope.” . . .

Once an individual has been arrested on probable cause for a dangerous offense that may require detention before trial, however, his or her expectations of privacy and freedom from police scrutiny are reduced. DNA identification like that at issue here thus does not require consideration of any unique needs that would be required to justify searching the average citizen. The special needs cases, though in full accord with the result reached here, do not have a direct bearing on the issues presented in this case, because unlike the search of a citizen who has not been suspected of a wrong, a detainee has a reduced expectation of privacy.

The reasonableness inquiry here considers two other circumstances in which the Court has held that particularized suspicion is not categorically required: “diminished expectations of privacy [and] minimal intrusions.” This is not to suggest that any search is acceptable solely because a person is in custody. Some searches, such as invasive surgery, or a search of the arrestee’s home involve either greater intrusions or higher expectations of privacy than are present in this case. In those situations, when the Court must “balance the privacy-related and law enforcement-related concerns to determine if the intrusion was reasonable” the privacy-related concerns are weighty enough that the search may require a warrant, notwithstanding the diminished expectations of privacy of the arrestee.

Here, by contrast to the approved standard procedures incident to any arrest detailed above, a buccal swab involves an even more brief and still minimal intrusion. A gentle rub along the inside of the cheek does not break the skin, and it “involves virtually no risk, trauma, or pain.” [A]nd nothing suggests that a buccal swab poses any physical danger whatsoever. A brief intrusion of an arrestee’s person is subject to the Fourth Amendment, but a swab of this nature does not increase the indignity already attendant to normal incidents of arrest . . .

Upon these considerations the Court concludes that DNA identification of arrestees is a reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure. When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and they bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

  The judgment of the Court of Appeals of Maryland is reversed.

  It is so ordered.

JUSTICE SCALIA, WITH WHOM JUSTICE GINSBURG, JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, AND JUSTICE KAGAN JOIN, DISSENTING.

At the time of the Founding, Americans despised the British use of so-called “general warrants”—warrants not grounded upon a sworn oath of a specific infraction by a particular individual, and thus not limited in scope and application . . . .

Although [today] there is a “closely guarded category of constitutionally permissible suspicionless searches,” that has never included searches designed to serve “the normal need for law enforcement.” Even the common name for suspicionless searches—“special needs” searches—itself reflects that they must be justified, always, by concerns “other than crime detection.” . . .

So while the Court is correct to note that there are instances in which we have permitted searches without individualized suspicion, “[i]n none of these cases . . . did we indicate approval of a [search] whose primary purpose was to detect evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing.” That limitation is crucial. It is only when a governmental purpose aside from crime-solving is at stake that we engage in the free-form “reasonableness” inquiry that the Court indulges at length today. To put it another way, both the legitimacy of the Court’s method and the correctness of its outcome hinge entirely on the truth of a single proposition: that the primary purpose of these DNA searches is something other than simply discovering evidence of criminal wrongdoing. As I detail below, that proposition is wrong . . .

[T]he Court elaborates at length the ways that the search here served the special purpose of “identifying” King. But that seems to me quite wrong—unless what one means by “identifying” someone is “searching for evidence that he has committed crimes unrelated to the crime of his arrest.” At points the Court does appear to use “identifying” in that peculiar sense—claiming, for example, that knowing “an arrestee’s past conduct is essential to an assessment of the danger he poses.” If identifying someone means finding out what unsolved crimes he has committed, then identification is indistinguishable from the ordinary law-enforcement aims that have never been thought to justify a suspicionless search. Searching every lawfully stopped car, for example, might turn up information about unsolved crimes the driver had committed, but no one would say that such a search was aimed at “identifying” him, and no court would hold such a search lawful. I will therefore assume that the Court means that the DNA search at issue here was useful to “identify” King in the normal sense of that word—in the sense that would identify the author of Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation as Jeremy Bentham.

The portion of the Court’s opinion that explains the identification rationale is strangely silent on the actual workings of the DNA search at issue here. To know those facts is to be instantly disabused of the notion that what happened had anything to do with identifying King.

King was arrested on April 10, 2009, on charges unrelated to the case before us. That same day, April 10, the police searched him and seized the DNA evidence at issue here. What happened next? Reading the Court’s opinion, particularly its insistence that the search was necessary to know “who [had] been arrested,” one might guess that King’s DNA was swiftly processed and his identity thereby confirmed—perhaps against some master database of known DNA profiles, as is done for fingerprints. After all, was not the suspicionless search here crucial to avoid “inordinate risks for facility staff” or to “existing detainee population,” ante, at 14? Surely, then—surely—the State of Maryland got cracking on those grave risks immediately, by rushing to identify King with his DNA as soon as possible.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Maryland officials did not even begin the process of testing King’s DNA that day. Or, actually, the next day. Or the day after that. And that was for a simple reason: Maryland law forbids them to do so. A “DNA sample collected from an individual charged with a crime . . . may not be tested or placed in the statewide DNA data base system prior to the first scheduled arraignment date.” And King’s first appearance in court was not until three days after his arrest. (I suspect, though, that they did not wait three days to ask his name or take his fingerprints.)

This places in a rather different light the Court’s solemn declaration that the search here was necessary so that King could be identified at “every stage of the criminal process.” . . . Does the Court really believe that Maryland did not know whom it was arraigning? The Court’s response is to imagine that release on bail could take so long that the DNA results are returned in time, or perhaps that bail could be revoked if the DNA test turned up incriminating information. That is no answer at all. If the purpose of this Act is to assess “whether [King] should be released on bail,” why would it possibly forbid the DNA testing process to begin until King was arraigned? Why would Maryland resign itself to simply hoping that the bail decision will drag out long enough that the “identification” can succeed before the arrestee is released? The truth, known to Maryland and increasingly to the reader: this search had nothing to do with establishing King’s identity . . .

In fact, if anything was “identified” at the moment that the DNA database returned a match, it was not King—his identity was already known. (The docket for the original criminal charges lists his full name, his race, his sex, his height, his weight, his date of birth, and his address.) Rather, what the August 4 match “identified” was the previously-taken sample from the earlier crime. That sample was genuinely mysterious to Maryland; the State knew that it had probably been left by the victim’s attacker, but nothing else. King was not identified by his association with the sample; rather, the sample was identified by its association with King. The Court effectively destroys its own “identification” theory when it acknowledges that the object of this search was “to see what [was] already known about [King].” King was who he was, and volumes of his biography could not make him any more or any less King. No minimally competent speaker of English would say, upon noticing a known arrestee’s similarity “to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect,” that the arrestee had thereby been identified. It was the previously unidentified suspect who had been identified—just as, here, it was the previously unidentified rapist . . .

The Court also attempts to bolster its identification theory with a series of inapposite analogies . . .

It is on the fingerprinting of arrestees, however, that the Court relies most heavily. The Court does not actually say whether it believes that taking a person’s fingerprints is a Fourth Amendment search, and our cases provide no ready answer to that question. Even assuming so, however, law enforcement’s post-arrest use of fingerprints could not be more different from its post-arrest use of DNA. Fingerprints of arrestees are taken primarily to identify them (though that process sometimes solves crimes); the DNA of arrestees is taken to solve crimes (and nothing else) . . .

Today, it can fairly be said that fingerprints really are used to identify people—so well, in fact, that there would be no need for the expense of a separate, wholly redundant DNA confirmation of the same information. What DNA adds—what makes it a valuable weapon in the law-enforcement arsenal—is the ability to solve unsolved crimes, by matching old crime-scene evidence against the profiles of people whose identities are already known. That is what was going on when King’s DNA was taken, and we should not disguise the fact. Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches. The Fourth Amendment must prevail.

Today’s judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the “identity” of the flying public), applies for a driver’s license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.

I therefore dissent, and hope that today’s incursion upon the Fourth Amendment . . . will some day be repudiated.