DNA Privacy Gets First U.S. Supreme Court Test in Rape Case

When Alonzo King was arrested for assault in 2009 after pointing a shotgun at several people, authorities had no reason to think he was also a rapist.

Then officials swabbed his cheek at the Wicomico County, Maryland, booking facility and ran his DNA through a nationwide database. The check linked King to an unsolved 2003 rape.

Now Kings conviction for the rape is set for argument next week at the U.S. Supreme Court, which will consider whether Maryland is violating the Constitution by collecting DNA samples from people arrested for serious crimes before they're convicted. The courts ruling, due by June, will be its first on the privacy of genetic information and will determine the fate of laws in at least 25 states that allow DNA collection at arrest.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Maryland in this case, there will be no real limits on when the government can collect DNA, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes the collection laws. She said that would be a huge privacy invasion.

Maryland argued in court papers that DNA gives police an invaluable investigative tool -- the gold standard of forensic identification. Backers of the practice point to cases where DNA collection upon arrest might have prevented additional crimes.

One of those advocates is Jayann Sepich, whose daughter, Katie, was raped and murdered in August 2003, when she was a 22- year-old graduate student at New Mexico State University. Police werent able to identify the killer, Gabriel Adrian Avila, until December 2006, after he was convicted and imprisoned for breaking into a house with a knife in an unrelated crime.

Jayann Sepich says Avilas DNA could have been collected in November 2003, when he was arrested for the break-in. While Avila was convicted in 2004, he was released on bail before beginning his sentence and fled to Mexico. Not until Avila was arrested again in 2006 was his DNA tested, connecting him to Katie Sepichs murder.

We got a bad guy and put him in prison, said Sepich. We could have done it three years sooner.

Sepich now works full-time to advocate for DNA laws. She helped persuade the New Mexico legislature to enact what became known as Katies Law, allowing for collection from anyone arrested for a violent felony.

Privacy advocates say there are more effective ways to get DNA to solve crimes that don't raise constitutional concerns.

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DNA Privacy Gets First U.S. Supreme Court Test in Rape Case