Who Is Looking for Your “Abandoned” DNA?
information it contains. “Abandoned DNA” comes into play when the police don’t have a DNA sample, and can’t force a suspect to give one up. So they search through trash for coffee cups, cigarette butts, anything that might contain a suspects genetic material. What they find, could belong to the suspect … or you.
Privacy experts and the courts disagree about the privacy rights we have over our DNA in the context of a police investigation. See the Boston Globe article.
Later this spring the Supreme Court will decide, in the case Maryland v. King, whether the police can force a suspect to give a DNA sample when he or she has merely been arrested—but not yet convicted—for a crime.