Mark Memmott reports:
By a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a Maryland law that allows police to collect DNA, without first getting a warrant, from persons who are arrested.
“When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and 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,” writes Justice Anthony Kennedy in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and associate justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito.
Read more on NPR.