State v. Michael Sharpe

Connecticut Supreme Court held that neither the police’s collection of DNA from a belt the defendant had discarded in the trash, nor the subsequent analysis of that DNA solely for purposes of identifying the defendant, violated his privacy rights under the state search and seizure clause or Fourth Amendment. Two dissenting justices opined that the state clause should be interpreted independently to preserve a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy in the identifying information gleaned from extraction and testing of shed DNA.