Supreme Court OKs Taking DNA From Arrestees

First, the concept that the actions of an individual is foreseeable (one of the aspects considered for determining negligence, and thereby liability) based on a t-shirt slogan is somewhat silly; as is the thought that having a dress code and enforcing it limits liability.

From reading a news report, we can find more information on this particular case.
To paraphrase the article, kid wears tshirt (which was within dress code), teacher tells student to change or turn inside out, kid refuses and starts arguing, and the teacher engages in an public argument with the student, which subsequently results in calling police to arrest the student for essentially disorderly conduct ("disrupting the school process").

I'm still trying to find a means of concluding this message by trying to find something meaningful in your statement to either confirm or contradict, but I can only conclude the following:

You, sir, are a Gibber.

*edited*

No, when you are arrested you are arrested. Then the police decide whether to charge you. The prosecutor is then handed the charges, and they decide which charges to pursue. The prosecutor then takes the charges to a grand jury. If the grand jury bills those charges then you are indicted. If you go to court and are found guilty of those charges then you are convicted.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

99.999% of the time yeah. >_>

There were 6.98 million offenders under the supervision of the adult correctional systems at yearend 2011

at least 1,100 convicted defendants who were cleared since 1995 in 12 “group exonerations,” that occurred after it was discovered that police officers had deliberately framed dozens or hundreds of innocent defendants, mostly for drug and gun crimes.

If so, why are these exonerations unknown? The fundamental reason is that there is no official method for recording exonerations. James Ochoa, for example, had his conviction vacated on motion of the Orange County, California District Attorney, and then charges were dismissed. If you examined the court records, that’s probably all you’d see. There might be no way whatever to know that it was an exoneration. Convictions are vacated for a host of more common reasons; modification of the sentence, for example. As a result, a record search would be extremely difficult even if the records were kept in one place. In fact, it’s impossible. Court records in America are scattered across 94 federal districts and several thousand county courthouses, and police records are even harder to locate.
....
Several attorneys who have obtained exonerations at this early stage have told us that it can be comparatively easy to persuade the prosecutor and the judge who tried a case to reopen it and to reverse the conviction when the trial is still fresh in their minds and before the case is taken over by other prosecutors and other judges on appeal – assuming, of course, that there is persuasive new evidence that the defendant is innocent. The hearing may be seen as a low-key process of correcting an error before it’s passed on. By the same token, they say, everybody understands that this sort of in-house error correction is supposed to remain in house. Rayshard Futrell’s appellate lawyer has told us that it would probably have been considerably more difficult to reach an agreement to release him if his case had attracted attention from the media.

Sorry to poke holes in your argument (oh, wait, no I'm not...) but the depiction of weapons is widely considered inappropriate on a public school campus, and I'm sure it was against dress code at this school the same as it has been every school I've ever been to.
While the dress code cited in the news article (to a page that looks like it was made in the early 90's) does not explicitly say weapons it does have things that are easily interpreted as being up to the person in charge to decide what does and doesn't count...
"Student dress and grooming should be in good taste and appropriate for the occasion."
"Clothing and accessories that display profanity, violence, discriminatory messages or sexually suggestive phrases are not to be worn at school or school functions."
Guns are a tool of violence... there's no way around that... Gun rights advocates may not like the term "violence" (because they want people to believe firearms are all sunshine and rainbows), but that's what they're designed for--violence... they're designed for hurting things...

Edit: Oh, and before I see the argument that it's not violent unless the gun is going off... let me suggest a counter argument...
Saying that a gun isn't a violent symbol unless it's actively being shot or going off is like saying a penis isn't a sexual symbol unless it's actively ejaculating...
A tool with a primary function doesn't stop being representative of that function simply because it's not currently being used... Firearms are used for intimidation and self-defense because of their capacity to easily harm others, not because they look scary.

Question about the swab test if anyone can chime in. How much of the genome will it document? I can't find much info online about that.

So long as it only does non-coding regions and doesn't reveal genetic traits and chronic conditions it's all golden. The minute it is allowed to reveal chronic conditions or traits it becomes a huge invasion of privacy.

Some jurisdictions have started to use their DNA databases for familial searching, which involves using offender profiles to identify relatives who might be perpetrators of crimes.

Are the objects below symbols of violence?


Because they certainly are firearms.

Fun thing about symbols.
- They don't mean the same thing for everyone.
- Context matters

The Court asserts that the taking of fingerprints was “constitutional for generations prior to the introduction” of the FBI’s rapid computer-matching system. This bold statement is bereft of citation to authority because there is none for it. The “great expansion in fingerprinting came before the modern era of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” and so we were never asked to decide the legitimacy of the practice.
...
As fingerprint databases expanded from convicted criminals, to arrestees, to civil servants, to immigrants, to everyone with a driver’s license, Americans simply “became accustomed to having our fingerprints on file in some government database.” But it is wrong to suggest that this was uncontroversial at the time, or that this Court blessed universal fingerprinting for “generations” before it was possible to use it effectively for identification.

So, to review: DNA testing does not even begin until after arraignment and bail decisions are already made. The samples sit in storage for months, and take weeks to test. When they are tested, they are checked against the Unsolved Crimes Collection—rather than the Convict and Arrestee Collection, which could be used to identify them. The Act forbids the Court’s purpose (identification), but prescribes as its purpose what our suspicionless-search cases forbid (“official investigation into a crime”)

Was that supposed to be some sort of retort? I specifically said guns are violent symbols--specifically because their primary function is to harm things. You can try to argue that not everyone sees guns the same way, which is fine, because generalizations are typically presumed faulty by nature; however, you can't make a reasonable argument regarding the technicalities of what a firearm is. Most any unbiased person will undoubtedly choose the archetypical pistol or rifle if you ask them to choose the picture of the gun given the choice between a pistol, rifle, or one of the makeshift contraptions you've pictured.
Violence is defined as "rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment."
A gun is defined as "a weapon with a metallic tube or barrel from which a missile is discharged, usually by force of an explosion."
A gun by definition implies violence.

By that rationale, the sun is a symbol of violence. So is a baseball bat, an icepick, a hammer, and a sander.

Are the objects below symbols of violence?


Because they certainly are firearms.

Fun thing about symbols.
- They don't mean the same thing for everyone.
- Context matters

Ancient civilizations used to sacrifice living humans, women and children included, to appease their sun god. In that context the sun is now a symbol of murder. So yeah he's waffling, needs to hamster more.

@Kara

I'm really concerned about the "family search" part. That seems entirely too invasive of a process seeing how police officers are extremely prejudiced when it comes to investigating a crime (confirmation bias). How hard would it be for someone to murder someone else, then drop some of their DNA in the area. Would only take a few weeks of facebook trolling to gather all the requires information then just wait for an opportune moment when that person would have no credible alibi.

People really should watch that video I posted earlier, I guarantee it will change your life.

I'm really concerned about the "family search" part. That seems entirely too invasive of a process seeing how police officers are extremely prejudiced when it comes to investigating a crime (confirmation bias). How hard would it be for someone to murder someone else, then drop some of their DNA in the area. Would only take a few weeks of facebook trolling to gather all the requires information then just wait for an opportune moment when that person would have no credible alibi.

People really should watch that video I posted earlier, I guarantee it will change your life.

Massachusetts 2013:
State chemist Sonja Farak has been accused of tampering with drug evidence, potentially affecting 60,000 samples in 34,000 cases.

2012 – Chemist Annie Dookhan has been accused of falsifying drug sample test results, forging paperwork and mixing up samples. Since then, over 200 defendants have been released and their cases have been put on hold while their lawyers challenge their convictions. Dookhan is believed to have been doing this for years.

Illinois 2011 – A former Detroit crime lab was abandoned with evidence left in the abandoned building for anyone to have access to. The lab, which closed in 2008, was investigated and it was discovered that the lab workers had been habitually sloppy and had high error rates.

New York 5/2010 – A NYPD criminalist was found to have taken shortcuts in testing drugs leading to unreliable results. The criminalist under question tested a substance for cocaine, determined it was negative and instead of retesting the sample, she marked the substance as positive for cocaine, leading all of the samples she had tested to be questioned.

In 1987, Roadcap explained to the jury at the rape/murder trial of Barry Laughman, that the killer's blood type "morphed" from B to A-to match Laughman's blood type-due to antibiotics the victim was taking at the time of her death. Her fantasy science stood for 16 years, until Laughman was cleared by DNA.

In a bench trial, Nebraska Judge Randall Rehmeier found that prosecutors had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Kofoed had planted blood from the murder victim in a car in an attempt to tie two innocent men to the crime. The men were eventually cleared and two Wisconsin residents were convicted of the murder.

I guess, for me, the parallels between the two still make them similar enough that I'm still a bit puzzled why one is so so much worse than the other. I get what Scalia was saying about the primary purpose of DNA sampling, and I think his dissenting opinion effectively skewered the majority opinion that DNA was taken for the purpose of identification.

It's entirely possible I'm just being too nitpicky about the previous statements, but it still seems to me that if one is against DNA sampling that they should be against fingerprinting for very much the same reasons. Yes, fingerprinting is primarily used for identification but it can be used to implicate (or exonerate) someone for crimes unrelated to whatever prompted the fingerprinting in the first place.

And honestly, I had never really thought about fingerprinting in this way before we started talking about it here, and he's right that it's just something we may take for granted and just assume is ok even though the practice has never been formally upheld. It's pretty obvious that a lot of these implications still need to be hashed out in front of the courts especially when you consider that the efficiency of DNA technology will eventually catch up that of fingerprinting.

Recent research provided additional evidence of this sort of bias through an experiment in which experienced fingerprint examiners were asked to analyze fingerprints that, unknown to them, they had analyzed previously in their careers. For half the examinations, contextual biasing was introduced. For example, the instructions accompanying the latent prints included information such as the “suspect confessed to the crime” or the “suspect was in police custody at the time of the crime.” In 6 of the 24 examinations that included contextual manipulation, the examiners reached conclusions that were consistent with the biasing information and different from the results they had reached when examining the same prints in their daily work.

OK I GO DO REAL WORK NOW

Tarnishing the DNA Gold Standard

The 2009 National Academy of Sciences report held out DNA testing as the gold standard of forensic techniques, but even the gold standard is a little tarnished.

In 2001, Kathryn Troyer, an Arizona crime lab analyst, was running a test on the state’s DNA database when she happened across two entries that matched at 9 of the 13 locations on chromosomes (loci) that are commonly used to identify a person.

Since the odds of a random 9-loci match between two unrelated people were estimated by the FBI as 1 in 113 billion, she assumed it was a duplicate entry. That belief was dispelled when she discovered that one person was black and the other white. Troyer then found dozens of similar 9-loci matches in Arizona’s 65,493-profile DNA database.

While labs in the U.S. try to match 13 loci, DNA recovered from crime scenes may be degraded or damaged; thus, sometimes fewer than 13 loci are used for DNA matches. In the United Kingdom only 10 loci are required for a match. Thus, Troyer’s findings were a matter of significant concern. “It surprised a lot of people,” said William C. Thompson, professor of Criminology, Law, and Society and Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California-Irvine. “It had been common for experts to testify that a nine-locus match is tantamount to a unique identification.”

When word of Troyer’s discovery got out, questions were raised about the accuracy of DNA match statistics. The FBI moved to prevent her findings from being distributed and attempted to block similar research elsewhere, even when court-ordered. Dismissing the “Arizona searches” as misleading and meaningless, the FBI suggested that states could be expelled from the national DNA database (CODIS) if they “tie up the database” with Arizona-type match searches.

FBI experts persuaded judges to block searches in some states. Regardless, “Arizona searches” were performed in two other states pursuant to court orders. The searches of DNA databases in Illinois and Maryland turned up almost 1,000 additional matches with at least 9 loci. In the 220,000-profile Illinois DNA database, 903 nine-loci matches were found. See:People v. Wright, 2010 WL 1194903 (Ill.App. 1 Dist. 2010) (reversing conviction based on a 9-loci DNA match where the trial judge had refused to allow an Arizona-type search of the state’s DNA database).

Only 32 nine-loci matches were found in Maryland’s 30,000-profile database, but three of those matched at 13 loci. The odds of that occurring randomly are quadrillions to one unless the profiles are duplicates or belong to identical twins or siblings. Maryland officials did not conduct follow-up research to analyze the 13-loci matches.

A subsequent search of Arizona’s DNA database found 122 nine-loci matches, 20 ten-loci matches, 1 eleven-loci match and 1 twelve-loci match. The latter two belonged to people who were related to each other.

At the very least, the results of the “Arizona searches” should spur experts to investigate whether the statistical basis of DNA testing used by crime labs – and often cited by prosecutors – is flawed. Admittedly, searching a database for any matches is quite different from comparing a single sample to the entire database, or comparing two samples to each other. Regardless, the existence of so many potential matches in DNA databases should call into question some of the basic premises of DNA statistics.

More than 40 researchers, forensic scientists, statisticians and academics urged the FBI to provide them with access to the 8.6 million DNA profiles in the nationwide CODIS database, after removing identifying information, so they could test statistical assumptions related to DNA matches. The FBI declined, citing privacy concerns.

PLN previously reported a similar issue regarding DNA comparisons in cold cases. When a DNA sample is run against a database, the statistical odds of an erroneous match increase in accordance with the size of the database. In some cases, the odds of an incorrect match may be as high as 1 in 3. But DNA experts frequently cite much lower odds as if the size of the database was not involved, which greatly exaggerates the ability of DNA databases to identify a single unique individual as a perpetrator in cold cases. [See: PLN, Jan. 2009, p.24].

“Fingerprinting and other forensic disciplines have now accepted that subjectivity and context may affect their judgment and decisions,” said Itiel Dror, a neuroscientist at University College London. “It is now time that DNA analysts accept that under certain conditions, subjectivity and even bias may affect their work.”

Dr. Dror and a colleague at Boise State University in Idaho conducted an experiment in which they independently provided a mixed DNA sample from the victim, the defendant and other suspects in a real criminal case to 17 analysts. The result? One examiner said the defendant “could not be excluded” based on the DNA evidence. Four reported the results were inconclusive, while 12 said the defendant could be excluded. In the actual case, two prosecution experts testified that the defendant, Kerry Robinson, charged in connection with a gang rape in Georgia, could not be excluded based on the DNA evidence. He was convicted.

Additionally, even when the accuracy of DNA testing is not at issue, the correct identification of the person whose DNA is being tested is equally important. In several cases labs have mixed up or improperly labeled DNA samples, then used the test results to implicate the wrong person.

In California, for example, a lab called Cellmark Diagnostics [5-4 Supreme Court ruling Justice Kagan filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor joined] switched the labels on DNA samples from the victim and the suspect in a 1995 sexual assault case, then reported there was a match even though the victim’s sample actually contained no DNA from the suspect. A Cellmark employee caught the error at trial. See: State v. Kocak, Superior Court of San Diego (CA), Case No. SCD110465.

In a similar 1999 case in Philadelphia involving defendant Joseph McNeil, the initial test results found that McNeil was the source of DNA left on the victim’s panties with a 99.99% exclusion rate for other potential suspects. However, McNeil’s sample had been switched with that of the victim. Revised test results excluded him as a suspect – though at the time the error was discovered, McNeil’s attorney had reportedly convinced him to take a plea bargain due to the apparently damning DNA evidence.

Another case that involved transposed DNA samples occurred in Nevada in 2001. Lazaro Sotolusson, a prisoner at the North Las Vegas Detention Center, was accused of raping his cellmate. DNA samples were taken from both men. The samples were swapped when they were entered into a lab computer, and a match was returned after they were compared to evidence in unsolved sex crimes. Because the samples had been switched, Sotolusson rather than the other prisoner was prosecuted for those crimes – which involved the sexual assaults of two juveniles at gunpoint. He spent a year in jail before the mistake was discovered in April 2002 by an expert retained by the public defender’s office, a month before he was scheduled to go to trial.

Prior to the error being found, authorities had said the odds that someone other than Sotolusson had committed the crimes were 1 in 600 billion, based on the presumed DNA match. “Despite the credibility commonly afforded to these [DNA] test results, this demonstrates there is always the possibility of human error,” said Public Defender Marcus Cooper.

Ominously, in August 2009 it was reported that scientists in Israel were able to fabricate DNA evidence, including blood and saliva samples. They claimed that if they could access a particular DNA profile in a database, they could make an artificial sample that would match it. “You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dr. Dan Frumkin, the lead author of an article on fabricating DNA evidence published in the February 2010 issue of Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this,” he added.