Police can collect DNA from arrestees, court says

http://hosted2.ap.org/TXWAC/8ef5320729ce4298abefc1903704c7d5/Article_2013-06-03-Supreme%20Court-DNA%20Collection/id-971679d42ffb4e1491ddac7f0bb96a1d

A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for police to take a DNA swab from anyone they arrest for a serious crime, endorsing a practice now followed by more than half the states as well as the federal government.

The justices differed strikingly on how big a step that was.

“Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s five-justice majority. The ruling backed a Maryland law allowing DNA swabbing of people arrested for serious crimes.

But the four dissenting justices said the court was allowing a major change in police powers, with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia predicting the limitation to “serious” crimes would not last.

“Make no mistake about it: Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,” Scalia said in a sharp dissent which he read aloud in the courtroom. “This will solve some extra crimes, to be sure. But so would taking your DNA when you fly on an airplane — surely the TSA must know the ‘identity’ of the flying public. For that matter, so would taking your children’s DNA when they start public school.“

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler agreed that there’s nothing stopping his state from expanding DNA collection from those arrested for serious crimes to those arrested for lesser ones like shoplifting.

“I don’t advocate expanding the crimes for which you take DNA, but the legal analysis would be the same,” Gansler said. “The reason why Maryland chooses to only take DNA of violent criminals is that you’re more likely to get a hit on a previous case. Shoplifters don’t leave DNA behind, rapists do, and so you’re much more likely to get the hit in a rape case.”

Twenty-eight states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests. But a Maryland court said it was illegal for that state to take Alonzo King’s DNA without approval from a judge, ruling that King had “a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches” under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The high court’s decision reverses that ruling and reinstates King’s rape conviction, which came after police took his DNA during an unrelated arrest.

Kennedy, who is often considered the court’s swing vote, wrote the decision along with conservative-leaning Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. They were joined by liberal-leaning Justice Stephen Breyer, while the dissenters were the conservative-leaning Scalia and liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Kennedy called collecting DNA useful for police in identifying individuals.

“The use of DNA for identification is no different than matching an arrestee’s face to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect, or matching tattoos to known gang symbols to reveal a criminal affiliation, or matching the arrestee’s fingerprints to those recovered from a crime scene,” Kennedy said. “DNA is another metric of identification used to connect the arrestee with his or her public persona, as reflected in records of his or her actions that are available to police.”

But the American Civil Liberties Union said the court’s ruling created “a gaping new exception to the Fourth Amendment.”

“The Fourth Amendment has long been understood to mean that the police cannot search for evidence of a crime — and all nine justices agreed that DNA testing is a search — without individualized suspicion,” said Steven R. Shapiro, the group’s legal director. “Today’s decision eliminates that crucial safeguard. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that other state laws on DNA testing are even broader than Maryland’s and may present issues that were not resolved by today’s ruling.”

Maryland’s DNA collection law only allows police to take DNA from those arrested for serious offenses such as murder, rape, assault, burglary and other crimes of violence. In his ruling, Kennedy did not say whether the court’s decision was limited to those crimes, but he did note that other states’ DNA collection laws differ from Maryland’s.

Scalia saw that as a crucial flaw. “If you believe that a DNA search will identify someone arrested for bank robbery, you must believe that it will identify someone arrested for running a red light,” he said.

Scott Berkowitz, president and founder of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, cheered the decision and called DNA collection “a detective’s most valuable tool in solving rape cases.”

“We’re very pleased that the court recognized the importance of DNA and decided that, like fingerprints, it can be collected from arrestees without violating any privacy rights,” he said. “Out of every 100 rapes in this country, only three rapists will spend a day behind bars. To make matters worse, rapists tend to be serial criminals, so every one left on the streets is likely to commit still more attacks. DNA is a tool we could not afford to lose.”

Getting DNA swabs from criminals is common. All 50 states and the federal government take cheek swabs from convicted criminals to check against federal and state databanks, with the court’s blessing. The fight at the Supreme Court was over whether that DNA collection could come before conviction and without a judge issuing a warrant.

According to court documents, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System or CODIS — a coordinated system of federal, state and local databases of DNA profiles — already contains more than 10 million criminal profiles and 1.1 million profiles of those arrested. According to the FBI, the DNA samples from people whose charges have been dismissed, who have been acquitted or against whom no charges have been brought are to be expunged from the federal system. But states and other municipalities that collect DNA make their own rules about what happens to their collections.

In the case before the court, a 53-year-old woman was raped and robbed but no one was arrested. Almost six years later, Alonzo King was arrested and charged with felony second-degree assault in a separate case. Relying on the Maryland law that allows warrantless DNA tests following some felony arrests, police took a cheek swab of King’s DNA, which matched a sample from the 2003 Salisbury rape. King was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison.

King eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of misdemeanor assault from his arrest, a crime for which Maryland cannot take warrantless DNA samples. The state court said King’s rights therefore had been violated when the state took his DNA based on that arrest alone.

Maryland stopped collecting DNA after that decision, but Roberts allowed police to keep collecting DNA samples pending the high court’s review.

The case is Maryland v. King, 12-207.

Ex-Ford execs charged in Argentine tortures

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/05/21/ford-execs-argentine-torture/2347861/

• The former executives are charged with crimes against humanity
• They allegedly supplied the military government with information about union workers
• There has been a wave of prosecutions for crimes committed by the military government

Three former Ford Motor Co. executives were charged Tuesday with crimes against humanity for allegedly targeting Argentine union workers for kidnapping and torture after the country’s 1976 military coup.

All three men are now in their 80s. Their case is part of a new wave of prosecutions focusing on corporate support for the dictators who ran Argentina in 1976-1983, and the 150-page indictment written by Judge Alicia Vence reads like a history lesson, going to considerable lengths to explain why their actions constitute crimes against humanity and why it has taken nearly four decades to result in criminal charges.

Factory director Pedro Muller, human resources chief Guillermo Galarraga and security manager Hector Francisco Jesus Sibilla are accused of giving names, ID numbers, pictures and home addresses to security forces who hauled two dozen union workers off the floor of Ford’s factory in suburban Buenos Aires to be tortured and interrogated and then sent to military prisons.

All three were ordered to remain under house arrest on bail of about $142,000 each. Galarraga and Sibilla are Argentines and Muller is described in the indictment as a Czech national.

Ford Argentina said in a statement that it was aware of the charges against the men but could not comment because the issue was still under judicial investigation.

“Ford Argentina is not a party to the case but has always kept a collaborative and open attitude with authorities and will provide all available information that may be required to clarify this situation,” it said.

The Associated Press left phone messages and sent emails seeking comment from the offices of lawyers for the three former executives, but there was no response.

The judge said the executives sought to eliminate union resistance at Ford’s Argentina subsidiary and clearly had inside information about the coming “dirty war” in which so-called subversives would be thrown into clandestine detention centers. She described a key meeting the day after the March 24, 1976, coup in which Galarraga told union leaders to “forget any kind of labor complaints” and all their problems would be resolved.

Witnesses recalled that union leader Juan Carlos Amoroso then asked about talks over money that workers said had been systematically removed from their paychecks. The human resources chief laughed and said, “Amoroso, give my greetings to Camps,” the judge wrote, a reference to Gen. Ramon Camps.

At the time, Camps was a little-known figure. Named police chief of Buenos Aires province by the military junta, Camps soon ran a system of clandestine detention centers where thousands of people were taken for torture and summary execution. Camps died in 1994 after being convicted of 73 torture deaths and other crimes so wide-ranging that many of Argentina’s current human rights trials involve a network of prisons known as “the Camps circuit.” About 13,000 people were kidnapped, tortured and disappeared, according to official counts.

“I find it remarkable that the head of human resources at Ford would know information so sensitive such as the function that Camps would develop in the future, something almost impossible to know if the company didn’t have a direct and concrete relationship with the military authorities who had overtaken the state institutions of that era,” the judge wrote.

Two nights after the meeting inside the Ford factory, a heavily armed group kidnapped Amoroso at home and took him to be beaten and interrogated, according to the indictment. Other Ford union workers were bound, with bags over their heads, and beaten inside a dining area next to the factory’s soccer fields, then hauled away to jails for more torture. Some were subjected to electric shocks; others were stripped naked and injured with power tools or made to undergo false executions as interrogators sought information about union leaders’ whereabouts.

The indictment also says that when two of the victims’ spouses went to authorities seeking information on their missing husbands, a colonel showed them a list of workers’ names on a Ford company letterhead and said it was the company, not the military, that wanted the men taken away.

The former president of Ford Motors Argentina, Nicolas Courard, would have been charged as well if he hadn’t died in Chile in 1989, the judge wrote.

About 5,000 workers were employed at the time by the Ford factory in suburban General Pacheco, producing the Falcon, a car that became a symbol of state terror because it was often used by military and police squads to carry off “subversives” and move them between secret detention centers.

The victims in this case include Pedro Troiani, Carlos Gareis, Jorge Constanzo, Marcelino Reposi, Adolfo Sanchez, Francisco Perrotta, Juan Carlos Ballestero, Pastor Murua, Ruben Manzano, Juan Carlos Amoroso, Fernando Groisman, Luciano Bocco, Juan Carlos Conti, Ricardo Avalos, Vicente Portillo, Carlos Propato, Luis Degiusti, Eduardo Pulega, Hugo Nunez, Ruben Traverso, Raimundo Robledo, Carlos Chitarroni, Roberto Cantelo and Hector Subaran.

Their treatment was investigated soon after the return of democracy in 1983, but the crimes later fell under a general amnesty that wasn’t overturned by Argentina’s Supreme Court until a decade ago. The case has developed since then and only now is coming to trial.

Israeli court considers landmark property law cases

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22608104

The Cliff Hotel is on a hill in a strategic location in Abu Dis, on the outskirts of Jerusalem

An Israeli border guard gives a warning shout as we approach the Cliff Hotel at Abu Dis, on the edge of Jerusalem.

“We’re too close now. I’m not comfortable. They are monitoring us from the roof and I don’t want to provoke anyone,” Ali Ayyad tells me.

The large building, erected by his father in 1954, was originally for residential use. It was converted into a hotel in the 1960s, and for many years Mr Ayyad was the manager.

“This is where I met my wife and many of my long-time friends. My daughters came here after they were born. We lived on the third floor. It was not just a home, it was a way of life,” he recalls.

“It’s got one of the most gorgeous views of Jerusalem you can imagine. We had 36 bedrooms and bathrooms and guests came from all across Europe. We had a beautiful garden with olive trees. Now that’s destroyed.“

In 1996, as the hotel was being renovated in a period of optimism following the Oslo Peace Accord, the Israeli army took it over citing a security need. However, it later withdrew after legal challenges.

Since 2003, the owners have faced several further attempts by Israeli authorities to seize the building. They are currently classed as “absentees” and the Custodian of Absentee Property controls the hotel.

“It’s absurd. It’s a subject I keep thinking about. How can the law find somebody absent when he or she very much exists? I have to keep pinching myself to show I’m present,” Mr Ayyad says.

Although he lives just 300m (1,000ft) away and has other relatives nearby, the former hotelier has a West Bank ID rather than Jerusalem residency.

The Israeli authorities now say that his building – which is close to the 1949 armistice line – falls within the boundaries of Jerusalem.

Refugees’ assets

Israel’s Absentee Property Law was passed in 1950.

After the war that followed the creation of the state, it was the main legal mechanism used to take over homes and land that belonged to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had fled or were displaced.

“It was very important. It was the first step to take control of the assets of the Palestinian refugees after the 1948 war,” says Professor Haim Sandberg, a land law expert at Israel’s College of Management.

The Supreme Court decision could ultimately affect many Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem

“When some years passed, the assets were sold to the Israel Development Authority and Jewish National Fund. Money was paid to the Ministry of Finance and they are holding the money maybe to one day compensate the former Palestinian refugees.”

From Palestinians’ point of view, the law has always been controversial. The rights of refugees are a core issue in their conflict with Israel.

However, thousands more Palestinians who live in the West Bank but own property in East Jerusalem could be affected by a Supreme Court decision expected after a hearing on Tuesday.

The court is considering appeals in four cases, including that of the Cliff Hotel, where the Absentee Property Law has been applied. This may set a new precedent for its continued use.

Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. Its annexation of the area is not recognised under international law.

Many of the Palestinians recently labelled as “absentees” have been cut off from their land by new structures like roads to Jewish settlements and Israel’s separation barrier in and around the West Bank.

Sporadic application

In 2005, Israel’s then-attorney general told the government to call an immediate halt to confiscating Palestinian property in East Jerusalem under the 1950 legislation. However the instruction has not always been followed.

Israel’s Absentee Property Law

• 1950: Absentee Property Law passed
• 1967: Israel captures and annexes East Jerusalem
• 1970: Knesset decrees East Jerusalem residents (who have Jordanian passports) not to be considered absentees in relation to property there
• 1973: New law allows some “absentees” to claim compensation for seized property
• 1980s: Accelerated process of settler takeover of properties in Palestinian parts of East Jerusalem. Often supported by Absentee Property Law.
• 1992: Klugman Committee report reveals scale of above and limitations are reintroduced for a few years
• 2004: Ministerial Committee for Jerusalem Affairs steps up use of the law
• 2005: Attorney General orders halt to use of the law where East Jerusalem properties belong to West Bank residents, but instruction not fully heeded

“There has not been systematic use of the Absentee Property Law but there is sporadic use and as a result there have been contradictory court verdicts. That’s why this is going to the Supreme Court,” says Israeli lawyer Daniel Seidemann.

Several Israeli government departments contacted by the BBC did not want to comment on the court hearing.

“The Supreme Court will make its ruling on this,” one official said. “Since Israel is a state of law, Palestinians can appeal to Israeli courts, as they did in this particular case.”

Mr Ayyad is anxiously waiting to see what happens.

“This is my life you know, 10 years of fighting to try to get back what is ours, to be able to go to my home, to be able to have a legacy for my family like my father had for his children,” he says.

Experts point out that the implications of the case could be far-reaching if Israel is given a green light to take over Palestinian-owned property around Jerusalem.

This could help cement its control over the eastern part of the holy city, which the Palestinians want as their capital under any future peace deal.

Supreme Court sides with Monsanto in major patent case

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/13/monsanto-patent-grain-biotechnology-soybeans-supreme-court/2116333/

Indiana farmer’s effort to replicate soybeans that are resistant to weed killer is determined to be a patent infringement.

The Supreme Court usually isn’t friendly toward questionable patents, but it came down overwhelmingly on the side of agribusiness giant Monsanto Monday in a case that’s bound to resonate throughout the biotechnology industry.

The court ruled unanimously that an Indiana farmer violated Monsanto’s patent on genetically modified soybeans when he culled some from a grain elevator and used them to replant his own crop in future years.

“If simple copying were a protected use, a patent would plummet in value after the first sale of the first item containing the invention,” Justice Elena Kagan ruled in a short 10-page opinion. “The undiluted patent monopoly, it might be said, would extend not for 20 years as the Patent Act promises, but for only one transaction. And that would result in less incentive for innovation than Congress wanted.”

Who it helps: Inventors and entrepreneurs who have patents on products that can be self-replicated, from computer software to cell lines. While Kagan’s decision is limited to the Monsanto case, it bolsters the argument that self-replicating products can be protected from patent infringement even if their challengers go through third parties.

Who it hurts: Consumers paying high prices. The Center for Food Safety released a report in February that showed three corporations control more than half of the global commercial seed market. It found that from 1995-2011, the average cost to plant 1 acre of soybeans rose 325%.

Monsanto’s soybeans represent the cream of the crop because they are resistant to the weed killer Roundup. Farmers must pay Monsanto’s price to plant the beans themselves.

That’s not what Indiana farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman did. After one year of going through Monsanto, he bought his second crop from a grain elevator. Then he used his own soybeans that resisted Roundup in future years — in essence, the court said, making copies of a patented invention.

Bowman’s attorney, Mark Walters, had argued that the Monsanto seeds were acquired innocently enough from the grain elevator, and that Bowman’s little operation never would threaten the company’s monopoly.

Two lower federal courts weren’t impressed with Bowman’s case, ruling in favor of Monsanto. And that argument carried little weight with the justices when the case was argued in February. They noted that Monsanto had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over more than a decade to perfect its soybeans — something it would not have done if others could so easily replicate them.

Bowman contended the soybeans were “self-replicating,” but Kagan said that “blame-the-bean defense” wasn’t worthy.

“Bowman was not a passive observer of his soybeans’ multiplication,” she said. “Or, put another way, the seeds he purchased, miraculous though they might be in other respects, did not spontaneously create eight successive soybean crops.

“It was Bowman, and not the bean, who controlled the reproduction (unto the eighth generation) of Monsanto’s patented invention,” Kagan said.

Fordham University School of Law professor Mark Patterson noted the decision stops short of determining how self-reproducing inventions should be handled in all cases.

“Justice Kagan, in the last paragraph of the opinion, noted that ‘such inventions are becoming ever more prevalent, complex, and diverse,'” Patterson said. “Either the court or Congress will have to address them again soon.”

Seed Diversity in Trouble: Monsanto Dominates Global Seed Supply

http://www.motherearthnews.com/print-article.aspx?id=2147513771

Reposted with permission from The Center for Food Safety. 

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) and Save our Seeds (SOS) – two legal and policy organizations dedicated to promoting safe, sustainable food and farming systems – have launched their new report,Seed Giants vs. U.S. Farmers.

The new report investigates how the current seed patent regime has led to a radical shift to consolidation and control of global seed supply and how these patents have abetted corporations, such as Monsanto, to sue U.S. farmers for alleged seed patent infringement.

Seed Giants vs. U.S. Farmers also examines broader socio-economic consequences of the present patent system including links to loss of seed innovation, rising seed prices, reduction of independent scientific inquiry, and environmental issues.

Debbie Barker, Program Director for Save Our Seeds and Senior Writer for the Report, said today:  “Corporations did not create seeds and many are challenging the existing patent system that allows private companies to assert ownership over a resource that is vital to survival, and that, historically, has been in the public domain.”

Among the report’s discoveries are several alarming statistics:

• As of January 2013, Monsanto, alleging seed patent infringement, had filed 144 lawsuits involving 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses in at least 27 different states.
• Today, three corporations control 53 percent of the global commercial seed market.
• Seed consolidation has led to market control resulting in dramatic increases in the price of seeds. From 1995-2011, the average cost to plant one acre of soybeans has risen 325 percent; for cotton prices spiked 516 percent and corn seed prices are up by 259 percent.

The report also disputes seed industry claims that present seed patent rules are necessary for seed innovation.  As Bill Freese, senior scientist at Center for Food Safety and one of the report’s contributors notes:  “Most major new crop varieties developed throughout the 20th century owe their origin to publicly funded agricultural research and breeding.”

Additionally, Seed Giants vs. U.S. Farmers reports a precipitous drop in seed diversity that has been cultivated for millennia. As the report notes:  86% of corn, 88% of cotton, and 93% of soybeans farmed in the U.S. are now genetically-engineered (GE) varieties, making the option of farming non-GE crops increasingly difficult.

While agrichemical corporations also claim that their patented seeds are leading to environmental improvements, the report notes that upward of 26 percent more chemicals per acre were used on GE crops than on non-GE crops, according to USDA data.

Further, in response to an epidemic of weed resistance to glyphosate, the primary herbicide used on GE crops, Dow AgroSciences is seeking USDA approval of “next generation” corn and soybeans resistant to 2,4-D, an active ingredient in Agent Orange.  Monsanto is seeking approval for GE dicamba-resistant soybeans, corn, and cotton.

At the launch of the report via teleconference today, experts from the Center for Food Safety and Save our Seeds were joined by Mr. Vernon Hugh Bowman, the 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who, next week, will come up against Monsanto in the Supreme Court Case.  When asked about the numerous comparisons being drawn between his case and the story of David and Goliath, Mr. Bowman responded, “I really don’t consider it as David and Goliath. I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong.”

In December of 2012, the Center for Food Safety, and Save Our Seeds submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of Mr. Bowman, which supports the right of farmers to re-plant saved seed. Arguments in the case are scheduled for February 19th.

The full report is available on the Center for Food Safety website. 

More information on the CFS and SOS can be found at: http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org