Chief Justice Roberts has issued a stay in the case of Maryland v. King, involving the collection of DNA samples from persons arrested but not yet convicted of burglary or crimes of violence. After Alonzo King was arrested for assault (for which he was eventually convicted), a DNA sample was taken, and it produced a "cold hit" on an unsolved rape. From that hit, he was indicted and a search warrant issued, producing another sample which also matched. He was convicted of first-degree rape and sentence to life in prison. The Maryland high court decided 5-2 that the statute violates the Fourth Amendment as applied in this case (to an arrestee rather than a convict), that the DNA evidence is "fruit of the poisonous tree" and must be suppressed, and the rape conviction must be reversed. Curiously, neither the majority nor the dissent discusses the good faith exception either for statutes or warrants, both of which would seem to apply here.
AP has this story.
AP has this story.
I'm a little rusty on my Fourth Amendment caselaw, but I seem to recall a case from Constitutional Crim Pro that said that a witness ID couldn't be the fruit of the poisonous tree. Here you have a witness ID, which then would have made the DNA subject to inevitable discovery. I realize that's a bit of a bootstrap, but I don't see why it wouldn't work here.