Maryland v. King

Maryland v. King
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 26, 2013 Decided June 3, 2013
Full case name	Maryland, Petitioner v. Alonzo Jay King, Jr.
Docket no.	12-207
Citations	569 U.S. 435 (more) 133 S. Ct. 1958; 186 L. Ed. 2d 1
Argument	Oral argument
Case history
Prior	King v. State, 422 Md. 353, 30 A.3d 193 (2011); opinion after grant of cert., 425 Md. 550, 42 A.3d 549 (2012); cert. granted, 568 U.S. 1006 (2012).
Holding
When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee's DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy Clarence Thomas · Ruth Bader Ginsburg Stephen Breyer · Samuel Alito Sonia Sotomayor · Elena Kagan
Case opinions
Majority	Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Breyer, Alito
Dissent	Scalia, joined by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. IV

Maryland v. King, 569 U.S. 435 (2013), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court which held that a cheek swab of an arrestee's DNA is comparable to fingerprinting and therefore, a legal police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.^[1]

The majority balanced state interests relating to detaining and charging arrestees against the affected individuals' interests in their bodily integrity and informational privacy. It concluded that it is constitutionally reasonable for the state to undertake the "negligible" physical intrusion of swabbing the inside of the legitimately detained arrestee's cheeks and using limited data from the DNA to determine whether the individual might be associated with a crime scene or victim.