The Thicket at State Legislatures

Remembering RFK, Who Inspired a Generation to Public Service

By Ed Smith

There are a few moments in life that draw together the strands of your life. We often don't even see the moment for what it is until later, years later in my case.

A moment for me came on the morning of June 5, 1968, 45 years ago today. I was a 14-year-old Irish Catholic kid growing up in Connecticut. The Kennedys loomed large in my nascent political consciousness. John Kennedy had been a hero and now Robert Kennedy was a rising political force rushing toward the White House. It was, after all, long before the bloom faded a bit from that particular Irish rose.

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In 1968 there was no cable TV, no Internet, essentially no way to get your news except the three TV networks, radio and the morning newspaper.

I was a paperboy. That morning I went out to open my bundle of Hartford Courants at 5:30, ready to walk the neighborhood to drop off the previous day's news. As I peeled away the brown paper wrapping I saw the headline that he'd been assassinated. Honestly, I can't remember the exact wording. Kennedy had been shot just after midnight and in those days newspapers actually chased their last edition to get in momentous breaking news.

I was stunned. I cried. Today I would have known the news before my first cup of coffee from the news feed on my phone, from Twitter, in a dozen different ways. In retrospect, I think the shock was greater, the news more profound delivered in heavy black ink on newsprint. It may just be age or maybe nostalgia, but equally shocking news now delivered moments after a tragedy occurs seems bled of the emotional punch.

But what sticks with me all these years later was the hour that followed. I walked my paper route and dropped The Courant on doorstep after doorstep. Since I knew almost no one had yet gotten the news at that time of the morning I realized every person, my neighbors, would pick up the paper from the stoop, unfold it and feel that punch in the gut. It was like walking in a funeral procession.

That was an awful year. RFK's murder came only a few months after Martin Luther King's death. That August in Chicago the Democratic National Convention became the place where the anguish over the Vietnam War and despair over the deaths of King and Kennedy spilled into a bloody confrontation in the public square.

 It was an ugly and messy time, but it stoked a passion that drew a generation into public service. It was a crucible that gave people across the political spectrum the nerve to step on the political stage, something we should never take for granted.

Ed Smith is the director of digital communications at NCSL.

Supreme Court: NCSL Amicus Brief Persuasive in Supporting Maryland Law on Police Taking Suspects’ DNA

By Susan Parnas Frederick

In a 5-4 decision on Monday, the United States Supreme Court ruled that when officers make an arrest for a serious offense based on probable cause and bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swap of the arrestee’s DNA is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.  The Court likened the DNA swap to other legitimate booking procedures such as fingerprinting and photographing. 

The decision reversed the Maryland Court of Appeals ruling that the Maryland DNA Collection Act as applied to arrestees, violated the 4^th Amendment as an unconstitutional warrantless search which violated the suspect’s right to privacy. The State and Local Legal Center, representing NCSL and six other national associations of state and local governments and a national law enforcement association, filed an amicus brief in this case supporting the Maryland law. [Previous sentence corrected 6/10/13]

The Court acknowledged that the use of DNA technology is critical to law enforcement, medicine and science.  Twenty-nine states and the federal government have arrestee DNA laws similar to Maryland’s.  The Court also ruled that Maryland’s law contained sufficient safeguards to protect arrestees.  The State and Local Legal Center's amicus brief was persuasive in arguing that the use of DNA by state and local police has documented successes in solving crime and that the government’s interest in solving crime with the proper safeguards outweighs an arrestee’s right to privacy in those circumstances. 

Susan Parnas Frederick is Senior Federal Affairs Counsel for NCSL and works in NCSL’s Washington, D.C. office.