Earlier this year, the Palm Beach Circuit Court encountered a unique and legally unprecedented issue: How should a court sanction an attorney who participates in the secret theft of a witness’s DNA?
In Peerenboom v. Perlmutter, et al., the court addressed a situation in which an attorney subpoenaed several individuals for deposition, solely for the purpose of surreptitiously collecting their DNA. The subpoenaed individuals had been accused of starting a hate mail campaign which targeted a prominent businessman in Palm Beach County. The individuals’ DNA samples were collected for the purpose of comparing them with traces of DNA left on the envelopes containing the hate mail.
