It’s a good thing the Heart Association decided to stop recommending mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and just to urge people to do chest pushes on someone suffering a heart attack. I think I’m a member of the ACLU (I sent them money a few times anyway), and I’m opposed to unreasonable searches of my seizures.
Already they’re covertly collecting my longitude and latitude.
I have an E-Z Pass box on my windshield, and an On-Star system came with the car; so I guess the government snoops would take the position that I have voluntarily put my whereabouts up for public auction. Actually, I was just trying to get into the fast lane at the toll booths where the On-Star system often sends me by mistake.
It’s an important issue, probably headed for the Supreme Court because if any of the Justices who have On-Star and EZ-Pass have been frequenting brothels, now there are public records of their travels, and I wouldn’t put it past them.
In San Diego, detectives shadowing a murder suspect picked up a cigarette butt he discarded, had it tested for DNA, and linked him to a murder fifteen years earlier where the same DNA was found in the blood stain on a towel. The defense attorneys are trying to get the cigarette butt suppressed on the grounds (sic) that its retrieval constitutes a search without a warrant.
It’s called surreptitious sampling.
Detectives contrive to get DNA specimens from coffee cups, water bottles, soft drink cans, tissues, straws, or silverware used by suspects. In one case in Massachusetts, the perp spat in the street, and the police.....oh yes they did.
The defense tried to suppress the evidence as an invasion of privacy. The judge thought otherwise. "The expectorating defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy," he ruled. I wish he had said the defendant had no reasonable expectoration of privacy, but in law school they discourage wordplay.
It’s a delicate issue. You definitely own your own saliva, and they have no right to come looking for it where it characteristically reposes. But once you spit it out on the sidewalk, even in righteous indignation, you’ve relinquished custody.
What if a suspect sneezes on a surreptitious detective?
Who owns the mucous droplet on the policeman’s lapel? Should the detectives be required to go to court for a snot warrant?
For that matter, who owns my fingerprints? And footprints?
I’ve left them everywhere, and it’s doubtful I could claim in court that I fully intended to go back and retrieve them at the Lost & Found. As for my personal aroma, I have to assume that’s theirs because they’ve used bloodhounds for decades without a challenge. But I don’t think they can sneak a filter into my bathroom sink because that would be entrapment.
Watch for future developments on the constitutional frontier of illegal search and seizure, but you know what? Surreptitious sounds like spit anyway.
Cross posted from The Horse You Rode In On