The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision today in Maryland v. King produced an unusual split. Justice Scalia’s colorful dissent was joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan; Justice Kennedy wrote for the Court, including for Justice Breyer. But it also brought to the fore some of the difficulties of interpreting and applying the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, where the facts of a given case play so large a role. It’s no accident that such cases are so often before the Court.
Here the main facts were fairly straightforward. Alonzo King was arrested in 2009 on an assault charge. At booking he was photographed and fingerprinted. And the police took a cheek swab for DNA testing, pursuant to a Maryland statute aimed at, among other things, law enforcement. Subsequent testing of the DNA sample enabled the police to link King to an unrelated, unsolved 2003 rape, for which he was subsequently tried and convicted. King argued that the police had no probable cause to believe that he had committed that 2003 crime and therefore had no basis for conducting the DNA search that ultimately linked him to it. The Maryland Court of Appeals agreed and threw out the evidence. The Supreme Court reversed that decision, holding that the DNA search was “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment.
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