Assembly bill would require anyone arrested in N.J. to give DNA sample


TRENTON — Some marijuana. A bar scuffle. Drinking in public. Under a measure introduced in the state Assembly, police would be required to collect DNA samples of anyone arrested.

Assemblyman Gary Chiusano (R-Sussex), who introduced the bill this week, said expanding DNA collection would help law enforcement solve more crimes and would be no more invasive than fingerprinting.

"I would rather err on the side of safety and for the law abiding people," Chiusano said in a telephone interview. "Many millions of people who have never committed a crime in their life have their fingerprints on file."

Currently, only those convicted of a crime must provide DNA samples. Under Chiusano’s bill (A4134), people who give a sample but are not convicted would be able to petition a judge to remove the information from the state DNA database.

Critics of the measure, and many others like it across the country, have raised serious privacy concerns and said it would place an additional and expensive burden on local police departments, which are already facing sharp cutbacks.

Federal appeals courts have been mixed on the question of taking DNA samples from arrestees. Critics contend the practice is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Supreme Court has never squarely addressed the issue and its legality continues to be debated.

"This would give the government the right to take a very intimate and intrusive picture of you and keep it in a database, which is disturbing," said Cornell William Brooks, executive director of the New Jersey Institute of Social Justice, an urban advocacy group.

The bill, which was introduced on Monday, also says that a person who refuses to submit a blood or biological sample could be charged with a fourth degree crime, punishable by up to 18 months in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, or both.

Nearly two dozen states have adopted legislation in recent years requiring DNA samples to be taken after an arrest, although some laws are more comprehensive than others.

In New Jersey, the Senate passed a bill (S737) this month that would extend sampling requirements to people arrested for violent crimes like murder and sex offenses, and an identical bill is awaiting an Assembly vote.

But Chiusano says the law should go even further.

"I’m not so concerned about a loss of privacy because this scientific data that is stored is not something that would have social security numbers, photo identification or a name and address," he said.

The state DNA database currently has 225,000 samples from people convicted of crimes, said a State Police spokesman, Sgt. Stephen Jones. About 1,500 samples are added each month, Jones said.

Mitchell Sklar, executive director of the State Association of Chiefs of Police, said local departments do not often deal with sampling, and Chiusano’s bill would "exponentially" expand their work.

"There would have to be a state policy established as to how you do it, what you do with the samples and how you transport them," Sklar said. "And if there’s an additional cost, who would pick it up?"

Chiusano said the cost would be minimal. "They probably have to have a bunch of envelopes around and throw them in the mail," he said.

But Sklar says the process requires a trained person to take a sample, someone to track a chain of custody and someone to transport it to a lab for testing and processing into the database.

Wayne Fisher, director of the Rutgers University Police Institute, said an expanded database may not be worth the cost just to solve crimes. But it could also be used to identify bodies, missing persons and criminals who don’t provide their real identity, he said.

"In some respects, DNA will become the fingerprint of the 21st century," Fisher said. "If it was worth it to spend money to build a fingerprint database for every person arrested, in my opinion it is equally worth it build a DNA database for anyone arrested."

But he said that if the bill were to pass, the state would have to ensure that it could process, pay for and make available the samples, otherwise they would not be useful.