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L.S. v. State12/17/2001
An appeal from the Circuit Court for Alachua County. Judge Ysleta McDonald.
This appeal requires us to review a finding that section 943.325, Florida Statutes, is constitutional as applied to appellant. We affirm.
This juvenile appellant pled nolo contendere to a burglary charge, in exchange for which the state agreed to drop the other charge. Adjudication was withheld, and she was placed on community control. The state then requested, pursuant to section 943.325, that she be compelled to give a blood sample for the purpose of DNA testing. Defense counsel objected and filed a motion to declare section 943.325 unconstitutional as applied to the offense of burglary, asserting that it violated "the Constitutional guarantees of the United States under the Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments as incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment, due process, and equal protection and Article I, Section 10 (ex post facto laws)," and that it also violated "the Florida Constitution under Article 1, Section 2, Basic Rights, Section 9, Due Process, Section 10, Prohibited Laws (ex post facto), Section 12, Searches and Seizures, Section 17, Excessive Punishments, Section 23, Right of Privacy, and Article 3, Section 6, Single Subject Rule." The memoranda of law filed by the parties were limited to the search and seizure, equal protection, and right to privacy issues.
Observing the strong presumption in favor of the constitutionality of statutes, and the fact that both sides agreed that an unwanted intrusion into the body is a search and seizure within the parameters of the Fourth Amendment, the trial judge phrased the question as "whether the search and seizure is unreasonable." The judge found that the intrusion required by DNA blood draws "is a reasonable one in light of the legislature's objectives" of preventing and solving future violent offenses. The judge further found that "the juvenile defendant has a diminished expectation of privacy" and that "state and federal courts around the nation have consistently held that felons, upon conviction, hold only a reduced expectation of privacy, and that the State's goals of preventing further crime and accurately identifying perpetrators is a legitimate one." The judge also noted that some courts have found that "statutes requiring DNA blood draws from those convicted of burglary and the data banking of those results do not violate the Fourth Amendment, because the requirements fulfill a `special need beyond law enforcement'" and that "the public's interest outweighs the minimal intrusion into the felon's privacy expectations."
As for the "overbroad" and equal protection challenges, the judge found that appellant "has not established that the legislature has targeted a suspect class in the change to Section 943.325" and that it appears "that the legislature has added burglary to the list of offenses for which one must give a DNA sample because of the number of persons who commit burglary and then go on to commit more violent crimes." The judge found that there was "a rational basis for the legislature's addition of burglary to 943.325" and that "the juvenile's expectation of equal protection under the Constitution has not been disappointed."
Finally, as to the claim that the DNA statute violates the state constitution's right to privacy protections, the judge found that appellant "has failed to establish that the requirement of the blood specimen infringes on a fundamental right" and ruled that the state's "showing that the requirement is rationally related to a legitimate state interest, as discussed above, renders the statute constitutional."
The parties agree that this is a case of first impression in Flor
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