Limit DNA sampling to convicted felons

THE ISSUE The women's caucus of the Legislature is proposing that DNA samples be collected from all people arrested for felonies.

THE Legislature's women's caucus is proposing that DNA be collected from all people arrested for felony offenses, but most states have limited the sampling to those who have been convicted, and for good reason. Aside from privacy rights, the task of expanding the collection of DNA is costly and has created backlogs in the states that do so.

Most states confine the collection of DNA to those convicted of various crimes for inclusion in a federal database authorized by Congress 14 years ago. Only 11 states have enacted laws to take DNA from arrestees, and two of those have stopped doing so.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled in 2006 that taking DNA from juveniles and adults arrested for violent felonies or burglaries violated federal and state prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Tennessee legislature repealed a similar law in 2006 because of the expense of hiring six additional DNA analysts needed to process the samples.

States that have neglected to sufficiently increase the staff of analysts have experienced severe backlogs. California, which began taking DNA swabs from adults arrested for murder or rape in November 2004, experienced backlogs of 160,000 DNA samples waiting to be processed by early last year.

California's pile of unprocessed samples is likely to grow enormously next year when the program will be extended to include people arrested for any felony offense -- the breadth advocated by the caucus of Hawaii's women legislators.