BOSTON, June 3, 2013—The nation’s highest court today affirmed the constitutionality of taking a DNA swab from suspects at the time of their arrests, calling them akin to the traditional identification methods of booking photos and fingerprint exemplars – a decision lauded by Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley.
“In the 21st century, DNA evidence is the gold standard for identification,” Conley said. “As the high court rightly notes, it can be gathered quickly, painlessly, and with minimal intrusion. It’s the natural extension of identification measures like booking photos and fingerprint cards. Each was cutting edge in its day, and no one can deny the justification for taking them at the time of arrest. The DNA swabs we take for law enforcement purposes have one purpose: to identify the subject to the exclusion of any other person. They carry no private or medical information, nor are we interested in that information.”
Massachusetts law currently mandates that felons provide a DNA sample at conviction, but not at arrest – even at an arrest for murder or rape.
The Supreme Court of the United States in its decision today in Maryland v. King held that “When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
The case arose out of a 2003 rape in Maryland in which an unknown, armed assailant left biological evidence behind at the scene of the crime. Six years later, Alonzo Jay King, Jr., was arrested for threatening several people with a shotgun. At the time of his arrest, officers took a buccal swab – essentially a cotton swab that lifted epithelial cells from the inside of his cheek. That swab was analyzed and found to be a match with the unique genetic profile of the 2003 rapist. King was convicted of that offense, but an appellate court later set aside that verdict as being based on an unlawful seizure of evidence. The high court decision reverses that decision, and King’s conviction now stands.
Under Conley’s leadership, Suffolk prosecutors have also made extensive use of DNA evidence to identify unknown assailants and exonerate innocent men – sometimes even in the same case.
In 1991, an innocent man named Anthony Powell was convicted of the violent rape of a young woman near Townsend Street in Roxbury. He spent 12 years in prison before Conley’s office affirmatively exonerated him based on subsequent advances in forensic science: the biological evidence from the rape case had been maintained under laboratory conditions and DNA testing proved in 2004 that it did not match Powell.
Conley’s office submitted the DNA evidence from Townsend Street to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which contains DNA samples from known offenders ordered to provide samples and unknown offenders whose DNA has been recovered from crime scenes. The sample did not match any known offenders, but it did match a sample recovered from a second 1991 attack.
Both of those attacks were approaching the end of the 15-year statute of limitations allowing prosecutors to bring charges. Accordingly, Conley’s office sought and obtained indictments in 2006 identifying the suspect only as “John Doe” and by his unique genetic profile. The Supreme Judicial Court would later uphold the propriety of those indictments, setting a precedent in Massachusetts law.
In 2007, JERRY DIXON (D.O.B. 4/19/73) was convicted of motor vehicle offenses in the Boston Municipal Court. Because of a 1991 felony conviction, Dixon was ordered to provide a DNA sample. That sample resulted in a “hit” linking him to the Townsend Street and Amory Street rapes, as well as a third sexual assault from the same year. Dixon was ultimately convicted of all three attacks and is serving a 30-year state prison sentence.
Shortly after taking office in 2002, Conley implemented a presumptive policy of allowing access to DNA evidence for convicted defendants when that evidence was unavailable at the time of trial. In 2011, he supported legislation to expand that voluntary policy statewide.
“These are good practices that serve the interest of justice, both in preventing and correcting erroneous convictions, and in helping to hold the guilty accountable,” Conley wrote to Sen. Cynthia Creem and Rep. Eugene O’Flaherty of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary in 2011. The legislation was signed into law last year.
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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
