"A federal appeals court declared unconstitutional Thursday a law requiring federal parolees to give blood for a DNA databank used to investigate crimes, a ruling that could also overturn laws in California and other states," reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
The law, passed by Congress in 2000, violates the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches because blood is extracted from parolees who are not suspected of committing new crimes, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in a 2-1 decision.
"Even parolees maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their own bodies," said Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the majority opinion. Although the government has targeted only a limited, supervised population for DNA collection, he wrote, "the rest of us might not be far behind." (...)
Nationally, the FBI has 1.4 million DNA samples in its databank, mostly from prisoners and parolees, said spokesman Paul Bresson.
