Legal Research

Posted by Chuck Kallendorf: "The Supreme Court yesterday afternoon held that convicted inmates had no constitutional rights to further DNA testing "in hopes of proving their innocence long after having been found guilty of crimes and having had started serving their sentences." ( MSNBC article) (USAToday article)

That case was District Attorney's Office for Third Judicial Dist. v. Osborne, 08-6 (Here)

"Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the 5-4 majority, acknowledged that DNA testing 'has an unparalled ability to both exonerate the wrongly convicted and identify the guilty,'" the USAToday article said, "But the said prisoners simply have no constitutional right to a state's biological evidence after conviction."

"Of the argument that the matter should be left to the individual states, USAToday said "Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for dissenters that recognizing a right to access for DNA testing 'would not prevent states from creating procedures for litigants, but merely ensure that they do so in a manner that is non-arbitrary.'"

Reversing an earlier 9th. District Court of Appeals decision back in, "the High Court declined to declare such a constitutional right that Roberts wrote, 'would take the development of rules & procedures in this area out of the hands of legislatures and the state courts in shaping policy in a focused manner and turn it over to the federal courts in applying the broad parameters of the due process clause."

Citing Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 719 (1997), the Court said, "the availability of new DNA testing techniques, however, cannot mean that every criminal conviction, or even every criminal conviction involving biological evidence, is suddenly in doubt. The task of establishing rules to harness DNA's power to prove innocence without unnecessarily overthrowing the established criminal justice system belongs primarily to the legislature."

The Court concluded by saying that there was "no reason to suppose that the federal courts' answers to those questions would be any better than those of the state courts and legislatures, and good reason to suspect just the opposite." [citing Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390 (1993) ]

Forty-six states and the federal government already have some sort of statutory base dealing with access to DNA evidence and inmate testing."