Communication and Ethical Issues Summary

Communication and Ethical Issues Summary

Michael Williams

University of Phoenix

Organizational Behavior and Management

Introduction

        Since its discovery in 1985 by English geneticist Alec Jeffreys, DNA Fingerprinting has been used by law enforcement to identify suspects of criminal offenses, exonerate those wrongly accused of a crime, and establish the identities of unknown victims of crimes (Www2.le.ac.uk, 2016).  DNA fingerprinting was first used as a crime fighting tool in 1987 and has since then become one of the major investigative methods used by the criminal justice system to link suspected individuals to a crime. (Calandro, Cormier & Reeder, 2005).  However, in the past few years the collection of DNA by law enforcement officials has come under serious scrutiny. Some feel that the police taking a person’s DNA without their knowledge, consent, or warrant, violates their 4th Amendment rights to protection against unreasonable search and seizure and some of these cases have made their way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

        Does the collection of DNA without consent violate an expectation of privacy?

        Several states have laws on the books that allow police officials to retrieve DNA evidence considered abandoned by a suspect without obtaining a warrant, the person’s consent, or after an arrest, even if that person is only a suspect of a crime.  Prosecutors consider DNA like skin cells, strands of hair, saliva from a discarded cigarette bud or eating utensils, left in a public place or discarded in the trash to be void of any expectation of privacy (Thompson, 2007).  In 1988, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police do not need a warrant to search a person’s trash because that person no longer could have expected an expectation of privacy when he/she discarded it (Taylor, 1988).  In 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States held that when officers make an arrest for a serious offense they are allowed to take and analyze a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA.  The justices equated it to being the same as taking a person’s fingerprints or photograph after making a legitimate arrest (Liptak, 2013).

Those opposed to these police tactics feel that police will use this as a way to gather DNA from anyone in society, even if they are not involved in a crime.  

How long can police keep your DNA on file after an arrest or conviction?

        DNA can be found on evidence that is decades old.  It is because of this that police can keep a person’s DNA on file for as long it is needed.  In 1980 the federal government developed a database called the Combined DNA Index System or CODIS for short.  This database stores DNA profiles for law enforcement agencies to compare against evidence gathered at a crime scene (FBI, 2016). Twenty-eight states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests with the aim of comparing profiles to the CODIS database, creating links to unsolved cases and to identify the person (Totenberg, 2013).