Buried in the state budget is an insidious provision that would upend the cherished American right of “innocent until proven guilty.”

This provision would create a huge new database of personal information collected from unwillingly people – many of whom have not and never will be convicted of a crime.

Before sending the budget to the governor, lawmakers snuck in a measure that would require all people arrested for some crimes, both misdemeanors and felonies, to provide a DNA sample for state records.

Keep in mind, these are people who have only been arrested. They have not been charged and have not been convicted of anything.

Current law requires a person to give a DNA sample only after being convicted of certain felonies.

Gov. Janet Napolitano has expressed support for the expanded DNA collection, which is troubling. She called it “the new fingerprinting.”

We don’t agree. DNA contains a person’s genetic code – something that cannot be determined from fingerprints. Once the state has that amount of personal information on you, what guarantee is there that it won’t be sold to insurance companies and other private entities, much as vehicle registration information now is?

This is a sweeping surrender of the civil rights of people who are only suspected of wrongdoing.

Fingerprints and DNA data are most assuredly not the same. We urge Napolitano to excise this measure from the budget using her line-item veto authority.

State Sen. Chuck Gray, a Mesa Republican and former police officer, is the key supporter of the provision. He said adding more DNA results to the state database would help solve crimes and take criminals off the streets.

If that’s what Gray wants, why limit it to people who are arrested for certain crimes? Why not require the collection of a DNA sample from every child born or attending school in Arizona? That way, the information can be kept on file forever in case those individuals commit a crime at some point in their lives.

The change would mean the collection of 75,000 more DNA samples per year. People who are never charged with a crime or are found not guilty could petition the state to destroy their DNA samples. But why should people have to go through a costly and lengthy process to regain privacy they should never have been forced to surrender?

Gray introduced a bill on this topic during the legislative session, but it stalled. It then was attached to the budget, where it sailed through with no discussion or debate.

Napolitano should now do what the Legislature failed to do: Take a careful look at this sweeping intrusion on our rights and remove it from the budget. There are better ways to solve crimes that do not trample on our civil rights.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Opinion. Tags for this post: Opinion-Politics, Opinion-Politics-World, page-b01, Politics, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.