The California Constitution guarantees the protection of people’s privacy and prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
The civil rights organizations believe that saving a person’s DNA in the CODIS increases the possibility for them to be mistakenly become a suspect in a criminal case. They argued that the “DNA collection and retention practices disproportionately put people of color at risk of mistaken arrest and conviction” due to the “deep racial disparities that plague our criminal justice system.”
In a statement, Lisa Holder, Interim Legal Director at the Equal Justice Society, said, “The over expansion of the CODIS database and California’s failure to promptly expunge profiles of innocent arrestees exploits and reinforces systemic racial and socio-economic biases.”
In addition, Holder said their lawsuit aims encourage the court to recognize that state’s DNA collection and retention practice is putting poor communities and people of color at “even greater risk of racial profiling and law enforcement abuse.”
