The News and Observer reports today on "a proposal to collect DNA from suspects when they are arrested for felonies or violent crimes." The bill in question is H1403, and it states that "any person who is arrested for committing a felony must provide his or her DNA sample . . . for . . . analysis and testing." (I don't see anything about "violent crimes" in the bill.) Readers will not be surprised to learn that the Attorney General supports the bill, while the ACLU is against it. I've blogged about this idea before. A similar bill was introduced last session, and I discussed the issue in this post. I noted that the constitutionality of this type of law isn't settled, and I won't repeat the analysis here. Instead, I'll note that officers already obtain DNA samples from arrestees in many cases. Sometimes this isn't controversial, as when an officer takes a hair sample with the arrestee's consent, or when the officer obtains a search warrant to draw the arrestee's blood. But I recently had an interesting email exchange about a practice that may be controversial, namely, the taking of biological material as part of a search incident to arrest. Our appellate courts have suggested that the authority to obtain biological material incident to arrest is quite broad. For example, in State v. Steen, 352 N.C. 227 (2000), the court said that it had "approved warrantless seizures of hair and saliva samples from a defendant incident to his arrest," and [...]
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