Ted Cruz: Supreme Court DNA Ruling 'Invites Abuse'

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said the the Supreme Court’s ruling to allow police to take DNA samples from those arrested for serious offenses just “invites abuse” from government. 

Cruz made his remarks on Mark Levin’s show on Tuesday and emphasized how dangerous it was to allow the government to have this kind of power to “collect this information” that could lead to a national DNA database. 

The Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 vote in Maryland v. King that police can take the DNA samples from those who have been arrested–even if they have not been tried or convicted–for a serious crime. Cruz noted after the decision in a statement that government can now “capture, without a search warrant, the most personal information about an individual, and use it to search vast databases for unrelated offenses.”

He also said the decision would allow the federal government to run “roughshod” over the Bill of Rights.

Cruz noted that since “all 50 States already collect DNA from convicted felons,” the “intrusion of liberty will matter only for those not convicted: the innocent and wrongly accused or those for whom there is insufficient evidence to convict.”

Cruz noted the the “the Fourth Amendment was adopted to prohibit the British practice of ‘general warrants’ targeting individuals absent specific evidence of wrongdoing”; if the government “has good cause for needing the DNA sample–such as trying to match DNA at a crime scene to a particular person where there is other corroborating evidence–then the government can ask a judge for a search warrant.”

Cruz, the former Texas solicitor general who once clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, said he agreed with Justice Antonin Scalia’s scathing dissent in which he wrote, “as an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”