This past April, California police announced they had a suspect for the “Golden State Killer” – 72-year-old Joseph James DeAngelo. Using genetic data from old crime scene samples, police uploaded his information into a genealogy website, GEDmatch, enabling them to identify DeAngelo’s relatives, and eventually narrow the pool down to find DeAngelo.
This case – along with others that have followed - has raised privacy concerns, leading many to wonder what the future for genetic privacy is under the Fourth Amendment
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Erin E. Murphy is Professor of Law at New York University Law School. She is a nationally recognized expert in forensic DNA typing, and her work has been cited multiple times by the Supreme Court. She is the author of Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA, and co-editor of the Modern Scientific Evidence treatise.
Andrea Roth is an Assistant Professor of Law at University of California Berkeley School of Law. Prior to teaching, Roth served as an attorney with the Public Defender Service for Washington D.C. (PDS), where she was a founding member of a Forensic Practice Group that studied and litigated forensic DNA typing. She has written extensively on the use of DNA in criminal law and procedure.
Jeffrey Rosen is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Constitution Center, the only institution in America chartered by Congress “to disseminate information about the United States Constitution on a nonpartisan basis.”
Related Documents
- Opinion in Maryland v. King 567 U.S. ___ (2013) U.S. Supreme Court, July 30, 2012
- Opinion in United States v. Jones 565 U. S. ____ (2012), U.S. Supreme Court, January 23, 2012
- Opinion in Riley v. California 73 U. S. ____ (2014), U.S. Supreme Court, June 25, 2014
- Transcript of Oral Argument in No. 16-1402, Carpenter v. United States, U.S. Supreme Court, argued November 29, 2017
- Text of California Electronic Communications Privacy Act Senate Bill 178 (P.C. §§ 1546 et seq.)
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