We support a Supreme Court decision saying persons arrested for a serious crime can be required to provide a DNA sample to authorities.

It's a good way to either convict a felon or prove a person innocent of a crime.

The court, by a 5-4 decision, likened DNA to the 21st century version of age-old fingerprinting. The government has been identifying criminals by using fingerprint evidence for more than 100 years.

It came down to the issue of infringing on a person's privacy. Fingerprinting has not been called an infringement.

Fingerprints are a fact. And both fingerprinting and DNA are accurate means of identifying a person. No two people have the same fingerprints or the same DNA.

And it's much easier to obtain a DNA sample than find fingerprints at a crime scene. All parts of a person's body, including hair, have DNA.

Other visible human characteristics may change over time, but DNA and fingerprints do not.

This is a big win for this area, as New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez was the Las Cruces district attorney during the prosecution of the person who raped and murdered New Mexico State University graduate student Katie Sepich in 2003.

Sepich's murderer had not been identified for three years. It wasn't until a DNA sample of Gabriel Adrian Avila, in prison for another crime, matched DNA at the scene of the Las Cruces crime. DNA showed the skin and blood under Sepich's fingernails matched the DNA of Avila.

In 2006, the New Mexico State Legislature passed what is known as Katie's Law.


It required anyone arrested on suspicion of a violent felony must be swabbed (usually in one's mouth) for DNA at the jail. It was expanded in 2011 to cover more crime suspects.

The Supreme Court ruling this week came after the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed the conviction of Alonzo King, who said his rights were infringed upon when a DNA sample was used to convict him of a second-degree assault in 2009.

As with the Sepich case, when King's DNA was run through a database, it matched a rape case six years earlier. King has been sentenced to life in prison.

The DNA samples are not just used for convictions. There are many cases on record where persons have been exonerated because someone else's DNA, not theirs, was obtained at the crime scene. Several of these persons were in prisons at the time DNA evidence proved they were not guilty.

DNA is a friend to prosecutors, and also a friend to the innocent.

The Supreme Court made the correct decision.