

Wilkins filed suit in the case of Wilkins v.

At the time, the Maryland State Police Department instructed their officers to focus on black males in expensive vehicles when conducting traffic stops. In May 1992, Wilkins was in a rented vehicle with three other family members when they were pulled over by Maryland State Police for violating the speed limit. He wrote about this experience, and the long history of the project, in Long Road to Hard Truth: The 100 Year Mission to Create the National Museum of African American History and Culture, published in 2016.

Bush on the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Wilkins was a member of the presidential commission that advised President George W. Starting in 2002, Wilkins was a partner at the Washington, D.C. Wilkins worked at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia from 1990 to 2002, serving as chief of special litigation from 1996 to 2000. Gilliam of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California.
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Professional career Īfter completing law school, Wilkins served as a law clerk for Judge Earl B. Wilkins then earned his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1989.

He studied chemical engineering at Rose–Hulman Institute of Technology and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1986. Upholding the statute simply because of restrictions on the use of the material obtained would be analogous to allowing the government to seize private medical records without a warrant, but restrict their use only to the portion of the records that serve to identify the patient.Wilkins was born in 1963 in Muncie, Indiana, where he was raised by a single mother. The collection of a DNA sample does not identify’ an arrestee or pre-trial detainee any more than a search of his home does - it merely collects more and more information about that arrestee or pre-trial detainee that can be used to investigate unsolved past or future crimes. The swab of the inner cheek to extract DNA interferes with arrestees’ privacy interests and is violating the Fourth Amendment. Therefore, it should not be considered only a means of identification such as fingerprints or photographs. As technological tools develop, much more personal information may be obtained from DNA samples. ReasoningĪn act of DNA sample collection represents a controversial issue related to an individual’s privacy and government interests. The Court of Appeals of Maryland decided that the Maryland DNA Collection Act is unconstitutional and reversed King’s rape conviction. Issuesĭoes DNA sample collection from arrestees and its analysis for identification purposes violate rights established by the Fourth Amendment? Holdings King received an allegation of 2003 rape with a DNA match as evidence. A second DNA sample was taken to obtain sufficient DNA for the statewide DNA database. It was found to match a DNA record linked with an unsolved rape case. King’s DNA sample was collected and analyzed via a DNA database. According to Maryland’s law, the Maryland DNA Collection Act, DNA samples should be taken from any serious crime-related arrestee. State of MarylandĪlonzo Jay King was arrested and charged with first and second-degree assault. Even though I understood most of the court’s process, it was hard to figure out what context various references to other cases bring as I am not familiar with them. Taylor stated that DNA analysis is strictly limited by the law and does not violate any medical condition privacies, hence it can be used for identification. She also denied that if DNA is used for identification purposes only it may represent a similar principle as fingerprint, voice or photographic identification. Davis insisted that DNA contains considerable amounts of personal information, which makes it impossible to use it as a means of identification as it violates the Fourth Amendment. As I understood, two opposing sides represented by Celia Anderson Davis and Robert Taylor provided various rational reasons regarding the issue of DNA use. State, which is related to the issue of the use of DNA evidence in the context of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. The paper depicts a Court of Appeals hearing on the case of King v.
