Broader DNA collection law proposed
02/22/2005
Conrad Defiebre, Star Tribune
February 22, 2005
Saying it would “help us solve and prevent crimes,” a House leader proposed Monday that DNA samples should be collected along with traditional fingerprints from all felony arrestees in Minnesota.
“The legislation will put guilty criminals in jail, exonerate the innocent and seek more immediate justice for victims,” House Majority Leader Erik Paulsen, R-Eden Prairie, said at a State Capitol news conference, where he was joined by two prominent law enforcement officials.
Civil libertarians oppose the measure as an unconstitutional license for open-ended searches of people who may never be charged with any crime.
Saliva swabs containing DNA “genetic fingerprints” now are taken from all 20,000 Minnesotans convicted of felonies each year, a protocol credited with linking them annually to 125 to 150 other crimes via “cold hits” on the state’s DNA database.
Paulsen’s proposal would add testing at the point of arrest of 4,500 suspects in violent and predatory crimes beginning in July, at an estimated cost for test kits and analysis of $200,000 a year. In 2010, testing would expand to all 50,000 felony arrestees each year. Eventually, Paulsen said, it could be extended to lower-level arrests.
The DNA tests are done at the forensic laboratory of the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) in St. Paul. Three years ago, the Legislature granted the BCA enough funding to begin collecting DNA samples from convicted felons, but not enough to analyze and add all the samples to the state database, said BCA lab director Frank Dolejsi.
The BCA obtained federal grants to analyze the felon samples, but that money ran out last July, he said. Since then the lab has had enough resources to analyze samples only from felons convicted of violent and predatory crimes, he said, leaving a backlog growing at a rate of more than 600 cases a month.
In the past four years, California, Louisiana, Texas and Virginia have begun DNA testing of all felony arrestees, Paulsen said, resulting in hundreds of matches of suspects to other crimes. “If we can collect DNA on a first offense, we may help stop a violent offender from committing crimes against the innocent,” he said.
Hennepin County Sheriff Pat McGowan said that average working Minnesotans won’t object to expanding DNA’s reach because it won’t affect them. Said Paulsen: “If you’re innocent you should have nothing to fear from this.”
His proposal would allow those exonerated after an arrest to petition a court for expungement of their DNA profiles from the state’s records. Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union, said that wouldn’t go far enough.
“It should be thrown away automatically,” he said. “And, by the way, so should the fingerprints.”
Paulsen’s bill, introduced Monday, would limit use of DNA files only to law enforcement authorities. But Samuelson said that’s an empty promise.
“Once you put this information into a system, it gets leaked,” he said. “Just like Social Security numbers were never meant to be used as a national identification system, DNA will be used negatively against people to deny insurance or to force medical treatment on them.”
But Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom called DNA “the most powerful tool available to prove the truth in criminal cases. It is clearly the trend in America.”
Senate Crime Prevention and Public Safety Chairman Leo Foley, DFL-Coon Rapids, said he will introduce a companion to Paulsen’s bill in the Senate.
“I think it has a good chance of passing,” said Foley, a retired state trooper who now is an Anoka County prosecutor. “The opposition arises more on the cost than on the civil liberties question.”
Traditional fingerprinting of all arrestees became widespread in the 1960s. Minnesota began taking DNA samples from sex-crime convicts in 1989, expanding the program to all violent felony convictions in 2000 and other felonies in 2002. Most other states do the same.
Samuelson said that post-conviction DNA tests probably pass constitutional muster. But testing criminal suspects before trial would especially affect minority groups who suffer high rates of arrest without subsequent convictions, he added.
“Why not take the DNA of everybody?” he said. “Then the state will know everything about you and, in its infinite wisdom, will be able to set better policy.”