Opinion ID: 783790
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Possibility of Exoneration

Text: 54 Finally, the government suggests that searches pursuant to the Act not only help to convict the guilty but also serve the commendable purpose of ensuring that the innocent will not be wrongly convicted. We would hope so. However, even if we were to assume that the clearing of the innocent is not a function of law enforcement—and that would be a troubling assumption, indeed—exoneration would still not serve to supplant the primary law enforcement objective of these searches—the solving of crimes and the prosecution of those responsible. The presence of a benign motive cannot justify a departure from Fourth Amendment protections, given the pervasive involvement of law enforcement. Ferguson, 532 U.S. at 85, 121 S.Ct. 1281. Otherwise, a regime of suspicionless searches for law enforcement purposes would nearly always be permissible. See id. at 84 n. 22, 121 S.Ct. 1281 ([U]nder respondents' approach, any search to generate evidence for use by the police in enforcing general criminal laws would be justified by reference to the broad social benefits that those laws might bring about (or, put another way, the social harms that they might prevent).). The Supreme Court has emphasized that the special needs cases provide a narrow exception to the ordinary Fourth Amendment requirements, not a convenient means by which to avoid the strictures of the Constitution. 55 Recent experience has proven the efficacy of DNA testing to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, and we do not doubt the importance of DNA collection for this worthwhile purpose. 32 Those who claim wrongful conviction or even wrongful accusation, however, may volunteer their DNA for this purpose; equally important, an act that required the states and federal government to collect and analyze the DNA when requested by such persons would not offend the Fourth Amendment. To the contrary, such an act would well serve some of the objectives the Department of Justice endorses here. 33 The DNA Act, as presently constituted, however, provides no choice to those from whom it requires that DNA samples be collected, and no option to others not covered by the Act who might be able to benefit greatly from its provisions. Accordingly, it is difficult to accept the government's representation of its concerns regarding the innocent. See also Miles, 228 F.Supp.2d at 1139 (It is disingenuous for the government to state that it needs to exonerate people who do not want to be exonerated.). 56 Whatever benign secondary purposes these searches may happen to serve, the primary purpose is to provide law enforcement officials, both at the state and federal level, with information about individuals that can be used to identify them as criminals and to prosecute them for their crimes. Kincade, should he be subjected to such a search, in effect will have been compelled to provide evidence with respect to any and all crimes of which he may be accused, for the rest of his life. Kincade has completed his sentence, and the court has ordered a term of supervised release for three years. The forced extraction of his blood with the subsequent categorization of his DNA would affect him for the rest of his life. Thus, he is entitled to the protection afforded by the Fourth Amendment.