SOUTH JERSEY (KYW Newsradio) — A rape investigation in North Jersey is raising questions about privacy for people born throughout the state.
It may not be widely known that the state collects blood samples from every baby born at a hospital and screens them for more than 60 medical conditions. Parents may remember the heel prick of their newborn at the hospital, but they may not remember agreeing to it amid the cloud of sleep deprivation and stress of the moment, because this practice is required in many states.
In Pennsylvania, those samples are stored for a year. New Jersey holds them in a lab for more than two decades.
“There are serious genetic privacy concerns there,” attorney CJ Griffin said.
“What’s happening, and what parents probably aren’t aware of, is that [New Jersey] is storing those blood samples for 23 years, and so we find that alarming.”
Cause for concern
It all stems from a cold case from 1996. New Jersey State Police reportedly used information from a family tree genetics website to narrow down the pool of possible suspects from an unsolved rape.
“They were able to allegedly identify the perpetrator as belonging to within a certain family,” Griffin said.
But a warrant is needed in most cases to get DNA from a potential suspect, and a warrant must be approved by a judge with legitimate evidence to demonstrate probable cause. Griffin says that’s not what happened with the blood sample in this case. The state police reportedly just issued a subpoena for the lab to produce the sample, and the lab complied.
“[New Jersey State Police] are skipping steps here and circumventing what the constitution requires,” said Griffin, adding it was only after getting this blood sample that the state filed for a warrant to obtain DNA directly from the suspect.
Related
Griffin is representing state public defenders and the newspaper New Jersey Monitor, who are seeking to unseal documents about how many times, and for which agencies, requests like this were granted without a warrant. The lab, Enviornmental Labs, is also included in the public record lawsuit, along with the N.J. Department of Health.
“We think some basic transparency is necessary here,” Griffin said. “How often is this happening? How many other types of uses are occurring here? Once we know, we can have a public debate, a public policy debate, about what safeguards should be in place — what uses are permissible and which are not.”
A New Jersey State Police spokesman said they cannot comment on pending litigation.
Related
Pennsylvania’s Department of Health issued a statement about stored samples:
“The department’s contracted lab ... stores dried blood spot specimens for one year after collection date before destroying. Samples will be stored at the lab for the 365 days. Should a parent wish the sample to be destroyed or released directly to them, we have authorization forms that they may complete to start the process.”
Some other states, including Texas, have destroyed the old blood samples that were in storage after being sued.