Fingerprints, DNA, and photos taken from minors

The Fourth Amendment is the part of the Constitution that bans unreasonable searches and seizures. In Davis v. Mississippi, the Court said a detention whose only purpose is fingerprinting is a seizure, so it needs probable cause or a judge's authorization. The Meridian police had neither. They had a general description and a list of local teenagers. That was not enough.

Once a person is lawfully arrested and booked, the picture changes. Fingerprinting and photographing are treated as ordinary booking steps, the routine that happens when someone is processed at a station. The Court described them that way in Maryland v. King (2013). For a minor, whether police fingerprint at all often depends on state law and the seriousness of the charge, so the same shoplifting stop can end with prints in one state and no prints in the next.

A DNA sample is usually a cheek swab, a cotton stick rubbed inside the mouth. In Maryland v. King, a man arrested for assault was swabbed at booking under a Maryland law, and the sample matched an unsolved rape. The Supreme Court held, 5 to 4, that when police arrest someone with probable cause for a serious offense and hold them at the station, taking a cheek swab is a reasonable search, like fingerprinting.

King was about an adult. It did not say every state must swab arrestees, and it did not say anything special about minors. Whether a juvenile's DNA is taken, at arrest or only after a court finds them delinquent, is a question each state legislature answers. Some states collect from juveniles only for specific felony-level findings. Some collect at arrest. The answer for you is in your state's DNA database statute, and a public defender in your county will know it.

Federal law gives one clear model. Under the federal juvenile delinquency statute, 18 U.S.C. 5038, a juvenile in a federal case is fingerprinted and photographed only after being found guilty of an act that would be a violent felony or a serious drug crime for an adult. Those prints and photos are kept under the same restricted-access rules as the rest of the juvenile file, and the juvenile's name and picture cannot be released to the public unless the young person is prosecuted as an adult.

State systems are looser or stricter depending on where you live, but the same shape repeats: juvenile records are confidential by default, and many states let you ask a court to seal or expunge them, which means the file is closed or destroyed. Our article on sealing and expunging juvenile records walks through that process. Ask whether DNA and fingerprint records are included in the sealing order, because in some states they need a separate request.