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By: Adam Liptak
Published: February 26, 2013
New York Times

On Tuesday, February 26, 2013, the Supreme Court argued over whether the police should take DNA samples from people they arrest. The argument that some people have is that this practice could potentially go against the Fourth Amendment, which states that there can be no unreasonable searches and seizures, and requires any warrant to be supported by probable cause. The question that has arisen is whether the Fourth Amendment should allow DNA to be collected from people who have "merely been arrested and so are presumed innocent.”

A case that collected DNA from a suspect is being reexamined because the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The case was about a man named Alonzo Jay King Jr. who was arrested on assault charges in Wicomico County, Maryland. He had a DNA test done by swabbing the inside of his cheek and found that his DNA matched evidence found in a rape case from 2003. But the court recently said that “a state law authorizing DNA collection from people arrested but not yet convicted violates the Fourth Amendment.”

But the opposing view said that “this is perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this court has heard in decades.” The state of Maryland has had a lot of success with DNA testing because they have arrested 42 people based on DNA evidence. But Maryland uses this method only for people who are arrested for serious crimes. One supporter of this said that people lose some of their rights when they are arrested and other man said it is fairly easy to obtain genetic material just by testing a glass of water that you drank out of.

A supporter of Maryland’s DNA testing system said that soon DNA will be able to be analyzed in 90 minutes. Justice Scalia said that the laws purpose it “to catch the bad guys, which is a good thing, but the Fourth Amendment sometimes stands in the way.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/us/supreme-court-hears-arguments-on-dna-sampling.html

 
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By Lydia Polgreen
Published: February 20, 2013
New York Times

     Last Thursday, Oscar Pistorius, double amputee who competed in the
2012 Olympic Games in London, shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in the early
morning because he had mistaken her for a burglar. On Wednesday, February 20,
2013, the simple bail hearing turned into a full-blown trail when the main
judge, Desmond Nair, questioned the prosecution’s main witness, Detective Hilton Botha, whose previous testimony did not fully match up to what he told on
Wednesday. Apparently, Pistorius thought a burglar was hiding in the bathroom,
so he got out of bed without his prosthetic legs on and shot at the bathroom
door. Detective Botha said that he actually was wearing his prosthetic legs when
he shot at the bathroom. 

     During the trail, Detective Botha admitted that there was sloppy
police work like the fact that they missed a shell casing found in the toilet
and they entered the crime scene without wearing shoe covers because the police
had ran out of them. Also, Detective Botha claimed that he found two boxes of
testosterone, which are banned substance for most professional athletes and are
known to increase aggression in people who take it, in Pistorius’s bedroom. But
Mr. Roux (Pistorius’s lawyer) said it was not testosterone, but a herbal
supplement. Later, Detective Botha admitted he didn’t read the whole name on the
box and the tests of the drugs have not come back yet. 
 
     Mr. Roux “accused the prosecution [Detective Botha] of selectively
taking ‘every piece of evidence’ and trying ‘to extract the most possible
negative connotation and present it to the court.’”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/world/africa/oscar-pistorius-murder-charge-bail.html?ref=world


 

 
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By: Elisabetta Povoledo and Alan Conwell
Published: February 11, 2013
New York Times

On Monday, February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he will resign on February 28, 2013. Benedict has only been in office for eight years and is the first pope to resign in six centuries, the last one being Gregory XII who left the papacy in 1415 to “end what was known as the Western Schism among several competitors for the papacy.” On Monday, the pope said “‘I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise’ of his position as head of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics.”

The Vatican spokesman, Reverend Lombardi, made it clear that there is no ‘motive’ for the pope’s resignation, but his health and age (85 years old) are stopping him from properly performing his duties as pope. But some believe that he is stepping down because of scandals centered on abuse. Apparently in 1985, “when Benedict was Cardinal Ratzinger, he signed a letter putting off efforts to defrock a convicted child-molesting priest.” There have been problems in the past and even today that the church has “shielded priests accused of molestation, minimized behavior it would have otherwise deemed immoral and kept it secret from the civil authorities, forestalling criminal prosecution.” In 2010, some secular and liberal Catholics demanded that for the resignation of the pope. So the question arises, is there something more to the story other than his declining health that has to do with the hard to ignore abuse scandals?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/europe/pope-benedict-xvi-says-he-will-retire.html?hp&_r=0