| Maryland v. King | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Argued February 26, 2013 Decided June 3, 2013 | |
| Full case name | Maryland, Petitioner v. Alonzo Jay King, Jr. |
| Docket no. | 12-207 |
| Citations | 569 U.S. 435 (more) 133 S. Ct. 1958; 186 L. Ed. 2d 1 |
| Argument | Oral argument |
| Case history | |
| Prior | King v. State, 422 Md. 353, 30 A.3d 193 (2011); opinion after grant of cert., 425 Md. 550, 42 A.3d 549 (2012); cert. granted, 568 U.S. 1006 (2012). |
| Holding | |
| When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee's DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. | |
| Court membership | |
| |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Breyer, Alito |
| Dissent | Scalia, joined by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. amend. IV | |
Maryland v. King, 569 U.S. 435 (2013), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court which held that a cheek swab of an arrestee's DNA is comparable to fingerprinting and therefore, a legal police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.[1]
The majority balanced state interests relating to detaining and charging arrestees against the affected individuals' interests in their bodily integrity and informational privacy. It concluded that it is constitutionally reasonable for the state to undertake the "negligible" physical intrusion of swabbing the inside of the legitimately detained arrestee's cheeks and using limited data from the DNA to determine whether the individual might be associated with a crime scene or victim.
- ^ Maryland v. King, 569 U.S. 435, 465-66 (2013)