The Legal Aid Society filed a class action lawsuit challenging New York City’s maintenance of the “Suspect Index,” a rogue DNA database, and its practice of secretly collecting the DNA of unsuspecting New Yorkers, without their consent or a warrant, to add it to a Suspect Index where it is constantly compared against the City’s entire database of DNA crime scene evidence, in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights and their rights under state law regulating the collection and maintenance of DNA records.

The more than 34,000 New Yorkers—including hundreds of children as young as eleven years old—in the Suspect Index are rendered suspects in every crime involving DNA evidence without any actual suspicion that they were involved in those crimes. The NYPD has targeted primarily Black and Latino New Yorkers by bringing them into interrogation rooms specially prepared to capture their saliva, skin cells, or other genetic material that people shed frequently and uncontrollably. The NYPD then collects these DNA samples—whether a cup from which someone drank or a pen with which someone wrote, among other examples—and sends them to the Office of Chief Medical Examiner (“OCME”), which extracts the person’s DNA, analyzes it, creates a DNA profile, and compares the profile against both specific evidence and OCME’s entire crime scene evidence database.

In August 2025, Legal Aid cross-moved for summary judgment and asked the Southern District of New York to declare that the City’s practice of secretly taking, analyzing, and maintaining peoples’ DNA is illegal, to enjoin the City from continuing to operate the Suspect Index, and to expunge all suspect profiles from the Index that were created and maintained as a result of the unconstitutional and unlawful policies and practices.

This litigation is staffed by attorneys in Criminal Law Reform’s Special Litigation Unit, DNA Unit, and JRP’s Special Litigation and Law Reform Unit.