As Baltimore County police announced the second arrest in less than a week of a man linked to a long-unsolved rape through DNA testing, Gov. Martin O'Malley said yesterday he eventually wants police departments to collect genetic samples as commonly as they do fingerprints.
The state already requires convicted felons and anyone twice convicted of certain misdemeanors to submit DNA samples to be added to a federal database.
O'Malley said yesterday that he would likely include in his legislative agenda next year a proposal to require samples from anyone who is arrested.
He said he wanted a policy modeled after one in Virginia, which, according to news reports, has enacted legislation requiring the collection of DNA from those arrested for violent crimes.
"For a long time, we have all understood the importance of fingerprints," O'Malley said. "By having a DNA library that is fully stocked, we are able to match that against evidence of crime scenes so we can pull predators off the streets before they rape and murder again."
Civil liberties leaders in the past have raised concerns about mass collection of DNA samples, and yesterday an official with American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland said O'Malley's idea has "tremendous privacy implications."
"Once these vast DNA databanks are in the government's hands, there are no limits to what they can and will do with them," said David Rocah, staff attorney for ACLU of Maryland. "Taking DNA samples from everyone who is arrested means you are inevitably taking lots and lots of DNA samples from people who are innocent."
The governor made his comments at the state police forensic laboratory in Pikesville, where scientists are working to reduce a backlog of genetic profiles to be analyzed. The backlog reached more than 24,000 by the end of last year, officials said.
O'Malley pointed to the arrest yesterday of a man charged with raping a 15-year-old girl in 2003 in Middle River as an example of the power of forensic technology.
The suspect, Jerry W. Blevins, 32, of an unknown address, was linked to the rape through DNA found on the scene that matched his genetic profile on the federal DNA database, county police said.
Blevins was arrested at a Baltimore County motel after a police officer found that a car in the parking lot was registered to him, police said.
Blevins was named in an arrest warrant charging him with the Middle River rape but was believed to have been in Ohio, where he had been jailed on an unrelated charge, police said.
