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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (469697)	10/2/2003 6:56:29 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 769670

The 9th strikes again. FBI DNA program struck down Court says prisoners can’t be ordered to give blood samples ASSOCIATED PRESS SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 2 — A federal appeals court declared Thursday that it was unconstitutional to require federal prisoners or those on supervised release to give blood samples for the FBI’s DNA databank. A THREE-JUDGE PANEL of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the first federal appeals court to address the federal DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act, said requiring convicts to give blood for a criminal database was a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches. Ruling 2-to-1, the San Francisco-based court said it was an unlawful invasion of privacy because the samples were taken without legal suspicion that the convicts were involved in other crimes. The DNA samples are turned over to the FBI. The results are analyzed and placed in an FBI databank open to law enforcement nationally. “Compulsory searches of the bodies of parolees ... require, at a minimum, reasonable suspicion,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote. The Justice Department did not have an immediate comment on the decision. The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit is the most liberal and most frequently overturned federal appeals court in the country. The court’s three-judge panels are known for several contentious rulings, including one that declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional in public schools and a decision last month that postponed California’s recall election. SCOPE OF RULING UNCLEAR Monica Knox, a deputy public defender of Los Angeles, said the government had extracted blood from thousands of inmates and former prisoners on supervised release. She said the decision, if it survived 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. 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immediately clear whether the decision would apply retroactively, meaning that those who have given blood could have it withdrawn from the databank.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, Knox said, it was too early to say whether new convictions based on the blood samples would survive. “That may have to worked out later,” she said. The case decided Thursday concerned Thomas Kincade, a parolee previously convicted of bank robbery who refused to give a blood sample. A lower court judge had upheld the law. Before Thursday’s decision, the 9th Circuit was one of several federal appeals courts that had upheld states’ ability to demand blood from convicts. But recent U.S. Supreme Court precedent swayed the 9th Circuit to alter course. Among those cases, the Supreme Court said in 2001 that South Carolina could not test pregnant women in hospitals for illegal drugs without probable cause that the patients were using drugs. And the high court allowed roadside checkpoints for drunken drivers for safety reasons but said the stops could not be used as a pretext for drug interdiction. msnbc.com