CA9: Pretrial DNA sampling reasonable

DNA sampling as a condition of pretrial release, 18 U.S.C. § 3142(b) and (c)(1), is upheld under the special needs test and every other challenge. The challenge of invasion of familial privacy is brushed off. United States v. Pool, 621 F.3d 1213 (9th Cir. 2010):

Addressing Pool’s concerns in inverse order, it is not clear that familial comparisons raise a constitutional privacy issue or, if they do, whose interests are violated. The concern with familial comparisons or partial matching is that a review of CODIS may disclose an individual whose DNA does not match precisely to crime scene DNA from a perpetrator, but is close enough to create a probability that the perpetrator is a close relative to the identified individual. The familial match is not implicated: by definition the match is not perfect, so the government knows that the match is not the perpetrator. It is questionable whether the rights of the perpetrator (if ultimately identified through the use of familial comparisons) are violated. This seems somewhat analogous to a witness looking at a photograph of one person and stating that the perpetrator has a similar appearance which leads the police to show the witness photos of similar looking individuals, one of whom the witness identifies as the perpetrator. It is questionable whether the person whose photograph helped focus the inquiry, or whose familial comparison helped focus the inquiry, has suffered any invasion of his or her constitutional right to privacy.

See Courthouse News Service.