In New York, often one of the first levels of defense that criminal lawyers & attorneys will implement in any criminal case in which physical evidence is at issue, is to dispute the manner in which the evidence was collected at or before arrest. Individuals in this country have the right to unreasonable government searches. The Fourth Amendment guarantees this right. In cases in which attorneys properly assert and successfully defend this right, the prosecution’s evidence against the criminal defendant is thrown out through application of the Exclusionary Rule. The Exclusionary Rule is generally the only remedy for the accused when the police or FBI have taken something from the defendant in violation of his or her right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment. Sometimes, this results in the entire criminal case being dismissed. Whether your NY attorney can get your case dismissed based upon unreasonable search and seizure by the authorities depends on whether the D.A.’s entire case hinges upon their ability to present their physical evidence to a jury.
Considering a matter of first impression, the First Circuit held that requiring a blood drawn from a defendant on supervised release, for purposes of creating a DNA profile and entering the profile into a centralized database pursuant to the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act, did not constitute an unreasonable search and seizure, at least to the extent that the government would not retain the profile after the defendant completed his term of supervised release. The government’s important interests in monitoring and rehabilitating supervised releasees, solving crimes, and exonerating innocent individuals outweighed the defendant’s privacy interests, given his status as a supervised release, the relatively minimal inconvenience occasioned by a blood draw, and the coding of genetic information that, by statute, could be used only for purposes of identification.
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