United States v. Mitchell Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

On July 25th, 2011, in the case of the United States v. Mitchell, the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals became the highest U.S. court to address the use of DNA in the handling of criminal suspects. The application and continued development of techniques for the collection, processing, and interpretations of DNA have raised a number of legal and ethical challenges for the criminal justice system. These challenges center on balancing the government’s interest in positively identifying individuals suspected of criminal activity against these individuals’ Fourth Amendment protections from unwarned search and seizures. The court’s ruling in the United States v. Mitchell held that law enforcement is legally justified in collecting and utilizing DNA for the propose of positively identifying pretrial arrestees, without the need to specifically obtain a warrant. This is a significant issue in the use of biometrics and identification. However, given both the narrow scope of the Mitchell decision and the small number of cases that address the use of DNA in processing criminal suspects, a number of arguments both for and against the constitutionality of these practices remain.

At the center of the ethical and legal issues concerning the use of DNA in the handling of criminal suspects is the distinction between the physical DNA sample that is collected from an individual and the DNA profile, which is the information created from that sample. In laying out its decision in the United States v. Mitchell, the appellate court used its judicial discretion to separate the two. Having separated issues concerning the physical DNA sample from the information resulting from an analysis of that sample, the court then found that given currently acceptable practices of identification, such as photographing and collecting fingerprints from a suspect, the collection of DNA for the identification of pretrial arrestees does not violate an individual’s due process rights.

Arguments for Constitutionality

In affirming the constitutionality of its decision in United States v. Mitchell, the court concluded that while the DNA sample itself does contain a great deal of information, including potentially private information about a suspect, because the profile that is created from that sample does not reveal any of this information and is only used for the propose of making a reliable positive identification of the suspect it is a constitutionally permissible law enforcement practice. In arriving at this decision the court noted several particular elements of the process by which a DNA sample is used to create a DNA profile for identification of a suspect. For instance, the court noted that such samples are typically handled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which does not record a suspect’s name or other identifiers (such as a case or Social Security number). Instead, as the court noted, the system only records the profile itself, the submitting agency, and the sample’s identification number (which includes the technician that worked on that sample).

Additionally, the court’s ruling found the use of DNA in this system to be constitutionally permissible, because while the DNA sample contains a variety of information, the profile only uses parts of the DNA that are not known to identify any trait in order to establish a positive identification through matching. Given these elements of the process, the court noted that if in the future these parts of the DNA sample were known to further identify individual traits, the court would have to reconsider the Fourth Amendment implication of its decision. However, from its observations of the current process, the court found that at present the interest of law enforcement agencies’ in making a positive identification of individuals in their custody outweighed concerns regarding a suspect’s privacy rights.

Arguments Against Constitutionality

Although the Third Circuit affirmed the use of DNA profiles for identification in the Mitchell case, other courts differ in their interpretation regarding the constitutionality of these practices. The arguments against the constitutionality of these practices note a number of potential issues regarding individual privacy. For example, while the CODIS system currently retains all of the samples that are submitted to it, it is unclear from the decision in Mitchell what should happen to samples taken from suspects that are not convicted of a crime (e.g., suspects who are acquitted or have their charges dropped). The Third Circuit did not address the issue of DNA sample retention because the sample had not yet been collected in the Mitchell case, barring it from being challenged.

Arguments against the constitutionality of using DNA for the identification of criminal suspects also maintain that obtaining the DNA sample itself requires a search and seizure of the individual that is far more intrusive than taking fingerprints or photographing a suspect. Additionally, arguments against the constitutionality of using DNA for identification note that unlike a fingerprint or photograph, there is at least the potential that DNA samples could reveal private, personal information in the future. Given all of these concerns, it is argued that taking the DNA sample should require an additional burden of proof under the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. The point at which a sample can be taken, the burden of proof needed to justify the search, and retention of the DNA samples used for identification, however, remain open issues in the wake of the Mitchell decision affirming the use of DNA for identifying criminal suspects.

Bibliography:

Lapp, Kevin and Joy Radice. “A Better Balancing: Reconsidering Pre-Conviction DNA Extraction from Federal Arrestees.” North Carolina Law Review Addendum, v.90 (2012).
Pownall, Megan “Twenty-First Century Fingerprints: The Third Circuit’s Approval of DNA Collection Upon Arrest in United States v. Mitchell.” Villanova Law Review, v.57/4 (2012).
Sivachenko, Irina. “DNA as the Twenty-First Century Fingerprint: Approval of DNA Collection Upon Arrest in United States v. Mitchell.” Boston College Law Review, v.53/6 (2012).
United States v. Mitchell, 652 F3d 387 3d Cir (2011).

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