Jordan Smith:
William Thompson, a professor emeritus of criminology and law at the University of California, Irvine, lives in University Hills, an on-campus residential community that affords, as he says, “poorly paid academics” in an area with high housing costs the ability to live near work. He was outside one day a few years ago when he was approached by a neighbor, another member of the university faculty, who had a story for him. She’d been walking her dog without a leash — which is generally against the law in Orange County, where Irvine is located — when she got stopped and cited for the misdemeanor offense. She expected to go to court to pay a fine (a first offense is $100), but when she got there, she found out it wouldn’t be that simple. Instead, she was told that to make the infraction go away, she would have to give up a DNA sample.
This was not the first time Thompson had heard a story like this. Thompson has been a DNA wonk for decades and has written extensively about issues with DNA analysis and the human factors, including biases, that can impact forensic sciences. As something of a go-to guy on campus where issues related to DNA are concerned, he’d been hearing similar stories from students. It wasn’t surprising that students occasionally found themselves sideways with the law for low-level issues like minor pot possession. “That kind of stuff,” he said. “Most of these minor cases would be settled by people showing up, pleading guilty, paying the fine.”
That began to change in 2007, when the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, or OCDA, started compiling its own DNA database. “Now students are coming in and saying, ‘Well, I went in to pay my $100. I didn’t want to hire a lawyer. I didn’t want to tell my family about this. So I was going to go pay my fine, but they wouldn’t let me,’” Thompson said. Instead, prosecutors were threatening to up a simple pot possession charge to “possession with intent to sell” unless the student agreed to surrender a DNA sample. He says students would ask, “Is this fair, professor, that they’re threatening to prosecute me for a felony, for something that’s not a felony, in order to get me to give my DNA?”
States have long maintained DNA databases containing the profiles of people convicted of felony crimes as well as unknown profiles developed from crime scene evidence. But those systems are created by legislation, strictly regulated, and publicly funded. They typically link up to the Combined DNA Index System, a nationwide network administered by the FBI that was built with the goal of helping to solve and deter crime.