BALTIMORE (AP)- A Maryland man convicted of raping his former roommate is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the conviction and his 100-year-prison sentence.
In papers filed Tuesday with the high court, Glenn Joseph Raynor says Maryland State Police violated his rights by testing DNA in his sweat, which was collected from a chair he had been sitting in during a voluntary interview at a police barracks.
The DNA linked Raynor to the rape.
A spokesman for Maryland State Police did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Thursday.
Raynor argues that gathering and testing his sweat without his knowledge or a warrant violates his constitutional right against unreasonable searches.
In August, Maryland's top court ruled that the DNA test was merely a method of gathering identifying information, like getting a fingerprint.
Raynor wants that decision overturned. Allowing it to stand would "permit technology to erase society's sense of personal security, forcing ordinary citizens to relinquish their expectation of privacy in their DNA when they enter a public place or identify themselves to the government," Raynor's lead attorney, Byron Warnken, said in a brief to the Supreme Court.
"Rejecting a reasonable expectation of privacy in free citizens' DNA will fundamentally alter the relationship between law enforcement and the general citizenry," Warnken wrote.
The Maryland attorney general's office will have about 30 days to respond to Warnken's petition for Supreme Court review.
Raynor's case is reminiscent of the court's decision in 2013 upholding a Maryland law that allows police - without a warrant - to swab the inside cheeks of people arrested on charges of a violent crime for DNA.
Unlike that case, Raynor had not been arrested when his sweat was collected, Warnken argued in his petition.
Raynor was "a free citizen" subjected to "surreptitious analysis of involuntarily shed DNA," Warnken wrote.
Raynor was convicted in the April 2006 rape of a woman who was his former classmate. A swab of Raynor's sweat, taken during a voluntarily police interview, revealed a match for DNA found on the victim's pillowcase and patio.
