A bill to limit the use of DNA samples taken from crime victims and witnesses, as well as babies under the state’s mandatory disease-screening program, advanced in an Assembly committee on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024. (Photo by Getty Images)
New Jersey lawmakers advanced a bill Thursday that would limit law enforcement’s use of DNA samples taken from newborns and crime victims.
The bill comes two years after the state Office of the Public Defender discovered that state police had used a baby’s blood sample taken as part of New Jersey’s mandatory newborn disease-screening program to charge the child’s father with a crime.
Under a bill Assemblymen Dan Hutchison (D-Gloucester) and Michael Inganamort (R-Morris) introduced in January, a DNA sample taken from a newborn — known as a blood spot — could only be used for disease screening. The bill also would permit law enforcement to use DNA taken from a crime victim or witness only to establish the identity of a person who’s the subject of the criminal probe or prosecution for which the sample was obtained.
The bill includes two exceptions, allowing DNA material to be used if a parent provides informed consent or if a judge issues a warrant or order. A warrant requires investigators to show probable cause.
“We want people brought to justice, but we need to keep intact the fundamental rights that make America the beacon of freedom it is,” Inganamort said in a statement. “Our Bill of Rights, specifically the Fourth Amendment, protects citizens against warrantless searches. While requiring a warrant, not a subpoena, might seem like an inconvenience, it is a fundamental protection against government overreach. We have to take the broader, longer view of these things.”
State Attorney General Matt Platkin added some restrictions in June to law enforcement’s use of newborn DNA in response to two lawsuits over the constitutionality of the state’s secret practice of storing the blood spots hospitals take from newborns to screen for 61 disorders and then allowing their use beyond disease detection. His changes, though, still allow law enforcement to obtain blood spots by administrative and Dyal subpoenas, which do not require a showing of probable cause.
Members of the Assembly’s judiciary committee considered the bill Thursday in Trenton, and unanimously agreed to advance it, after hearing from Fletcher Duddy, an assistant public defender in the state Office of the Public Defender.
Fletcher Duddy of the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender testified on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024, before the Assembly’s judiciary committee. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
That office, along with the New Jersey Monitor, sued the state in 2022 after state officials refused to release information about the newborn screening program. Another lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice remains ongoing.
Thursday, Duddy urged lawmakers to tweak the bill to make it explicitly clear that newborn blood spots cannot be used “for any law enforcement purpose.”
“If law enforcement does want to collect genetic samples, whether it be an adult, a child, a newborn, they can always apply for a warrant through the normal course,” Duddy said.
The bill, which was introduced in January, has no Senate companion. This is the second time this bill has been introduced in the Legislature; the Assembly’s judiciary committee also advanced it unanimously in 2022, but the bill failed to reach the Assembly floor or get a Senate companion in that session, too.
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