Opinion ID: 787362
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Governmental Interests

Text: 161 I now turn to the government's interests in conducting the searches in question. The plurality has described these interests as enormous, overwhelming, and monumental. Certainly, one would think that such interests involve the prevention of a terrorist act, the defusing of a ticking bomb, the discovery of the missing weapons of mass destruction, or something similarly weighty. Not so. According to the plurality, these words describe the normal, everyday needs of law enforcement — preventing crimes, encouraging rehabilitation, and bringing closure to victims by solving old crimes. I agree that the government has a very strong interest in solving and deterring crime. But I disagree that the interests sought to be advanced by the DNA Act are anything other than the ordinary needs advanced in favor of every program designed to assist crime control. See supra, at 856-857 (describing the Act's primary purpose). 162 In order to make the government's interests appear stronger than they are, the plurality contends that searches pursuant to the Act serve the commendable purpose of ensuring that the innocent will not be wrongly convicted. See ante, at 839 n. 38. I would certainly hope that the Act would be used for such purposes. Recent experience has shown that DNA evidence can help exonerate the wrongfully convicted, 29 and I would be the first to applaud a statute that helped wrongfully accused or convicted individuals obtain DNA analysis for that worthy purpose. 163 Unfortunately, that is not the Act we review today. The DNA Act does nothing to assist the wrongfully accused or convicted. The Act provides no option for DNA testing to those who seek to prove their innocence, and no funding to states or localities to help provide DNA sampling when requested by those who contend that were wrongfully arrested or convicted. It simply requires the collection and maintenance of blood samples from those in our society the state believes to be the most likely to commit crimes. It is thus difficult to accept the government's representation of its concerns regarding the innocent. 164 It is undoubtedly true that were we to maintain DNA files on all persons living in this country we would make the resolution of criminal investigations easier. 30 The same would be true were we willing to sacrifice all of our interests in privacy and personal liberty. Those who won our independence chose, however, not to follow that course but instead to provide us with the safeguards contained in the Fourth Amendment. We as judges do not have the authority to sacrifice those constitutional protections. D. Summary 165 Were we to apply the totality of the circumstances analysis, I would hold that the balance of considerations makes the programmatic suspicionless searches unconstitutionally unreasonable. The invasions of privacy the Act authorizes are substantial; the probationers and parolees subjected to its provisions maintain reasonable expectations of privacy; and the government's interest, while significant, is no stronger than its ordinary interest in investigating and prosecuting crimes. On balance, the government's desire to create a comprehensive DNA databank must give way when weighed against the privacy interests at issue and the extent of the intrusion involved. 166 When democratic values are lost, society often looks back, too late, and says when did this happen — why didn't we understand before it was too late? Today's decision marks one of those turning points — a fatally unwise and unconstitutional surrender to the government of our liberty for the sake of security, and, should the plurality's theory ever become law, the establishment of a doctrine that would leave us without the legal tools to halt further abolition of our privacy rights. The compulsory extraction of blood samples and the maintenance of permanent DNA profiles of American citizens is, unfortunately, the beginning not the end. 1984 arrives twenty years later than predicted.