‘Reasonable under the 4th Amendment’
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2013 that Maryland’s DNA Collection Act did not violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unlawful search and seizure. The act enables law enforcement to collect a DNA sample from people arrested for “serious” crimes.
The DNA collected from five rape victims in Augusta indicated that a single predator was at work.
But the predator himself, an exceptionally violent rapist who forced two of his victims into an Augusta cemetery before sexually assaulting them, remained unknown.
Authorities did finally collect the DNA of Michael Christian Clay as he entered state prison after a conviction unrelated to the rapes. (He had beaten his girlfriend and was driving her to the hospital when he ran over a teenager walking to catch his school bus.)
Once Clay’s DNA profile hit the database, the predator in Augusta was unmasked. He is now serving life in prison for multiple convictions on charges of rape, aggravated sodomy, kidnapping and false imprisonment.
What if Clay’s DNA profile had already been entered into law enforcement databases — not when he was sent to prison in 2009, but many years earlier?
Richmond County District Attorney Ashley Wright believes Clay would have been arrested before two of the rapes occurred. He would have been in prison instead of on the road, running down a teenager with his car. The final rape victim linked to him, who later died of injuries she suffered during the attack, might still be alive.
“We have an unsowed resource,” Wright said of DNA samples taken at arrest. “It’s a way to protect people in the future and to provide closure to people who have been affected. It’s a way to stop violent predators.”
Many Georgia prosecutors, like Wright, can point to examples of crimes that might not have happened if Georgia allowed the collection of DNA upon arrest. Thirty-one states, with Mississippi being the most recent, take genetic samples of people arrested for at least some crimes, and prosecutors in Georgia are pushing to do the same thing here for people arrested for violent crimes, drug offenses and burglary.
