Fingerprinting: A Violation of the Fourth Amendment?

Citizens should not be subjected to being fingerprinted before the age of 18. First of all, it violates their privacy by infringing on their 4th Amendment Rights: Unreasonable Searches & Seizures. Secondly, gathering and maintaining the fingerprints that will be uploaded to the databases of this magnitude would be very costly and time-consuming; the government should spend their money wisely on other proven crime-fighting tools. Moreover, these measures may have a negative impact on criminal investigations, such as leading to wrongful convictions.

Citizens are registered with the government at the time of their birth by being issued a social security number and birth certificate. As soon as children are born, hospitals also take their hand and footprints, and these are filed with the state along with their original birth certificate. Prints do not change with age; however, because infants’ fingers are so small, you would have to zoom into them to obtain a clear, clean print. Nevertheless, any additional fingerprinting prior to the age of 18 would infringe on citizens’ 4th Amendment Rights, which stipulate that people have the right to “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”. Arguments in favor of creating a fingerprint database are most likely proposed by those constituents who are Public-Order Advocates; these individuals believe that under certain circumstances involving a criminal threat to public safety, the interests of society should take precedence over individual rights. I, on the other hand, am an advocate of Individual-Rights: personal, or individual, freedoms need to be protected within the justice system. We cannot force every single individual to undergo a process that was originally intended for criminals. Fingerprinting should only take place after an arrest has been carried out.

Furthermore, gathering and maintaining the fingerprints would be another challenge, both monetarily and logistically. A process would need to be implemented in which people would be obligated to report to a specific location, such as a police department, to be fingerprinted. How will the government keep track of all the people that need to be fingerprinted? How much money will it cost to record all of these individuals’ prints? Where will they be stored? The ideal place would be an electronic database, where they won’t be damaged and are easily accessible, but then- are they too easily accessed? Could they fall into the wrong hands? These are all questions that need to be asked (and answered) when proposing that citizens be fingerprinted prior to the age of 18.

Finally, having everyone’s fingerprints in the palm of your hand, or one click away, may not be beneficial to criminal investigations. Criminal investigations are based largely on evidence, particularly DNA and fingerprints. Let’s assume, for example, that a detective walks into a crime scene in a family home, where a woman was brutally stabbed to death in her bedroom. She is married and her husband claims to have found her. He called 911. After the evidence was analyzed, there is a print found on the murder weapon. The print is run through the database, and it is determined that it belongs to the husband’s female secretary after it is run in the system. Normally, those closest to the individual, or the person who found the body, would be the first person of interest, no? Well, imagine this twist. Is it possible that the husband and the secretary had an affair? Was she in the house before the murder cutting something? Is that why her print is on the knife? In the end, the husband was having an affair with his secretary and he was indeed the one who murdered his wife, but since the print on the knife belonged to the secretary and (for sake of the argument) she did not have an alibi for that night and she had motive (text messages to the husband stating that she was jealous of the woman and wanted her dead), the man allows the secretary to take the fall for the murder. Now, since the woman had never committed a crime, her fingerprint would not have been in the database, and eventually further investigation may have led detectives to the discovery of the husband as the murderer; however, because of the simplicity of being able to acquire a fingerprint so effortlessly, the woman became entangled in this predicament.

Overall, having citizens fingerprinted before the age of 18 is a clear violation of individuals’ rights. Even the Patriot Act, which many believe directly violates the 4th Amendment, requires that you at least have some probable cause prior to performing any such action. There is no justification. If the government/law enforcement wants to lower crime or apprehend criminals more efficiently, they should invest in hiring more police officers and detectives, rather than enable all the lay-offs and “hiring freezes” that are occurring.

References

Cornell University Law School. (n.d.). Fourth Amendment: An Overview. Retrieved October 7, 2017, from LII: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fourth_amendment

The USA PATRIOT Act: Preserving Life and Liberty. (2016, August 24). Retrieved October 7, 2017, from Justice.gov: https://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/highlights.htm