Court Opinion

ID: 9497286
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:47:33.56292+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:06.185190
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
New technologies test the judicial conscience. On the one hand, they hold out the promise of more effective law enforcement, and the hope that we will be delivered from the scourge of crime. On the other hand, they often achieve these ends by intruding, in ways never before imaginable, into the realms protected by the Fourth Amendment. Which is no doubt why the Supreme Court has told us to be wary of “this power of technology to shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy.” Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 34, 121 S.Ct. 2038, 150 L.Ed.2d 94 (2001).
The heat sensor technology at issue in Kyllo was a promising new tool for law enforcement, except for one small defect: It let the police get information about what was going on inside people’s homes— something the Fourth Amendment generally prohibits without a warrant. DNA fingerprinting is another case in point. The good news is that it lets police identify people far more easily than would be possible using retro technology. The bad news is that those people could well be us.
Once Kincade completes his period of supervised release, he becomes an ordi*872nary citizen just like everyone else. Having paid his debt to society, he recovers his full Fourth Amendment rights, and police have no greater authority to invade his private sphere than anyone else’s. The difficult question is whether the government may exploit Kincade’s diminished Fourth Amendment rights while he is still a probationer to obtain his DNA signature, so it can use it in investigating thousands of crimes nationwide, past and future, for the rest of Kincade’s life. Displaying an exuberant faith in the positive power of technology, the plurality opinion answers this question with a resounding yes, but I remain skeptical. Stripped of its bells and whistles, the plurality’s theory seems to be this: We have a pretty good idea that people who have committed crimes in the past are more likely than others to commit crimes in the future. It is thus very, very, very useful for us to get their DNA fingerprints now so we can use them later to investigate crimes.
But if we accept the legal presumption— not questioned here by anyone — that once Kincade leaves supervised release he will be just like everyone else, authorizing the extraction of his DNA now to help solve crimes later is a huge end run around the Fourth Amendment. Or, to state it in reverse, if the reason for taking Kincade’s DNA while he’s on supervised release is that it will help solve crimes later, it seems equally justifiable to take his blood after he comes off supervised release. Ex-probationers are just as likely to commit crimes as people now on probation, and including them in the CODIS database would surely help solve even more crimes. Balancing the minor intrusion the plurality sees from the taking of blood- — a mere pinprick — against the “monumental” benefits to society, op. at 839, it is unclear how the balance could be struck any differently as to ex-probationers than as to current ones.
Which brings us to the people we really need to worry about, namely you and me. If collecting DNA fingerprints can be justified on the basis of the plurality’s multi-factor, gestalt high-wire act, then it’s hard to see how we can keep the database from expanding to include everybody. Of course, anyone who already has to give up bodily fluids for alcohol or drug testing— airline pilots, high school athletes, customs inspectors and people suspected of driving while intoxicated — would be easy prey under the mushy multi-factor test. But, with only a little waggling, we can shoehorn the rest of us in. As the plurality notes, blood is taken from us from the day we are born pretty much till the day we die, and on many days in between. What exactly happens to that blood after it leaves our veins? Most of us don’t know or care, presuming (if we consider it at all) that whatever isn’t used for testing is discarded. But what if Congress were to require medical labs to submit the excess blood for DNA fingerprinting so it can be included in CODIS?
Applying the plurality’s balancing analysis, I'm hard pressed to see how this would violate anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights. The benefits would continue to be huge. The more DNA samples are included in the database, the better off we are: More guilty parties will be found, more innocents will be cleared and more unknown crime victims will be identified. On the other side of the ledger, the costs would be meager. By glomming onto blood already extracted for other purposes, the government would have eliminated what the plurality identifies as the most serious negative factor — the piercing of the skin. Op. at 836-38. Moreover, it’s hard to say that most of us have any expectation as to what happens to our blood once it leaves our veins in the doctor’s office; we certainly don’t expect it to be returned to us. Arguably, we have no more reasonable expectation of privacy in *873blood turned over to third parties and abandoned than we do in our trash cans or bank records. See California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 39-41, 108 S.Ct. 1625, 100 L.Ed.2d 30 (1988) (no reasonable expectation of privacy in materials left on public street, like garbage); United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435, 442-43, 96 S.Ct. 1619, 48 L.Ed.2d 71 (1976) (no reasonable expectation of privacy in material conveyed to third party, like bank records, even if conveyed in confidence and for a limited purpose). And without a reasonable expectation of privacy, there isn’t even a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes. Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 31-33, 121 S.Ct. 2038. Which is why it is important to recognize that the Fourth Amendment intrusion here is not primarily the taking of the blood, but seizure of the DNA fingerprint and its inclusion in a searchable database.
The plurality’s approach will cut even closer to home as our techniques for extracting DNA improve and identifying information can more easily be obtained from urine and saliva, or from hair follicles inadvertently pulled out during a visit to the barber or hairdresser. As the plurality points out, op. at 838 n.37, we can’t go anywhere or do much of anything without leaving a bread-crumb trail of identifying DNA matter. If we have no legitimate expectation of privacy in such bodily material, what possible impediment can there be to having the government collect what we leave behind, extract its DNA signature and enhance CODIS to include everyone? Perhaps my colleagues in the plurality feel comfortable living in a world where the government can keep track of everyone’s whereabouts, or perhaps they believe it’s inevitable given the dangers of modern life. But I mourn the loss of anonymity such a regime will bring.
This isn’t an issue we can leave for another day. Later, when further expansions of CODIS are proposed, information from the database will have been credited with solving hundreds or thousands of crimes, and we will have become inured to the idea that the government is entitled to hold large databases of DNA fingerprints. This highlights an important aspect of Fourth Amendment opinions: Not only do they reflect today’s values by giving effect to people’s reasonable expectations of privacy, they also shape future values by changing our experience and altering what we come to expect from our government. A highly expansive opinion like the plurality’s, one that draws no hard lines and revels in the boon that new technology will provide to law enforcement, is an engraved invitation to future expansion. And when that inevitable expansion comes, we will look to the regime we approved today as the new baseline and say, this too must be OK because it’s just one small step beyond the last thing we approved. See Eugene Volokh, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope, 116 Harv.L.Rev. 1026, 1077-1114 (2003). My colleagues in the plurality assure us that, when that day comes, they will stand vigilant and guard the line, but by then the line — never very clear to begin with — will have shifted. The fishbowl will look like home.
Anyone who doubts that CODIS will expand, prodded by the voracious appetite of law enforcement, has only to consider the growth of fingerprint databases. In 1924, when J. Edgar Hoover became head of what was to become the FBI, the Justice Department’s fingerprint files contained only prints of those who had at some point passed through the criminal justice system. Hoover, who favored universal fingerprinting, moved to expand the database and aggressively lobbied local law enforcement officials to submit prints to the FBI. He took a further step in 1929 *874and began fingerprinting all civil servants. The Alien Registration Act, passed in 1940, eventually delivered over a million prints to the FBI. See Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification 246^47 (2001). Today, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System contains the fingerprints of over 47 million people, including prints “acquired related to a background check for employment, licensing, and other non-criminal justice purposes” and “submitted voluntarily by state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies.” U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Fed. Bureau of Investigation, IAFIS, at http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cjisd/iafis.htm (last visited Aug. 4, 2004). Several states require fingerprints of all drivers’ license applicants. See, e.g., Cal. Veh.Code § 12517.3(a)(1); Colo.Rev.Stat. § 42-2-107(2)(a); Tex. Transp. Code § 521.142(b)(1). California all by itself has the prints of over 22 million drivers’ license holders on file, see Dep’t of Motor Vehicles, Driver Licenses Outstanding by County (2003), at http://www.dmv. ca.gov/about/profile/dl-outs-by-county.htm, as well as the prints of lawyers, Cal. Bus. & Prof.Code § 6054, and certain welfare recipients, Cal. Welf. & Inst.Code § 10830(b)(1). See also Nat’l Conf. of State Legislatures, Biometrics Implementation Legislation by State (2002), at http://www.ncsl.org/programs/esnr/ licenseD.htm. Not all these fingerprint databases are currently in searchable form, but given our improving ability to store biometric identifiers electronically, it’s only a matter of time.
Because the great expansion in fingerprinting came before the modern era of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence ushered in by Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967), it proceeded unchecked by any judicial balancing against the personal right to privacy. As a consequence, we have become accustomed to having our fingerprints on file in some government database. The suggestion that law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, must destroy the fingerprints of those who were wrongfully arrested and booked, and were later released, would today be greeted by reactions ranging from apathy to a disdainful snigger. Why? Because we have come to accept that people — even totally innocent people — have no legitimate expectation of privacy in their fingerprints, and that’s that.
Judge Gould commendably recognizes the troubling implications of using Kin-cade’s status today to extract his DNA for use after he ceases to be on supervised release, but leaves for another day whether Kincade might be entitled to have his DNA removed from CODIS once his status changes. Had the government sought to justify the extraction of the DNA as a measure for ensuring Kincade’s compliance with the terms of his supervised release, I would be tempted to agree with Judge Gould. But the government did no such thing. Kincade’s probation officer did not seek to have Kincade’s DNA extracted to better supervise him — blood extraction for DNA typing purposes was not an explicit probation condition, nor was there any showing that the probation officer had determined that extracting Kin-cade’s blood and typing his DNA was necessary or desirable to improve his chances of successfully completing probation. The record clearly shows that the probation officer ordered Kincade to submit a blood sample only to comply with the DNA Act. The government thus seeks to justify the blood extraction precisely so his DNA will be available in the CODIS database for the rest of his life.
The plurality enthusiastically accepts this justification and thus has already an*875swered the question Judge Gould would keep in reserve. As a practical matter, moreover, the chance that Kincade could have his DNA removed from the CODIS database once he completes his supervised release is about the same as the chance that someone arrested and fingerprinted, but eventually found innocent, could force the FBI to delete his fingerprints from its database, namely nil. While I sympathize with Judge Gould’s reluctance to speak on an issue that might be better resolved later, on this record we have no choice: The extraction of Kincade’s blood for DNA typing must be justified on the ambitious grounds advanced by the government and accepted by the plurality, or not at all. For the reasons eloquently expressed by Judge Reinhardt in his dissent, and those stated above, I cannot agree that the sus-picionless extraction of blood to include Kincade’s DNA in the CODIS database can be upheld under the Fourth Amendment. The time to put the cork back in the brass bottle is now — before the genie escapes.