The following editorial appeared Tuesday in the Longview Daily News.

Every law-abiding citizen has reason to applaud the Washington Supreme Court’s recently issued opinion upholding the state law requiring DNA samples from all felons and certain other offenders. It is hoped that we’ve seen the last of these legal challenges.

The law – enacted in 1989 and expanded in 2002 to include those convicted of gross misdemeanors, such as stalking – has allowed Washington to build a DNA database that’s proving to be one of law enforcement’s more useful crime-fighting tools.

Significantly, this database benefits not just the victims of rape and other brutal crimes, but also those wrongly accused or convicted of such crimes. DNA tests this year from a child rape case in Olympia, for example, cleared one suspect of charges and led to the arrest and charging of another.

The database is tremendously helpful in solving crimes old and new. In 2004, King County prosecutors brought charges in a 1968 murder, based on a match between DNA evidence gathered at a crime scene in 1968 and a Walla Walla inmate’s genetic profile found in the state’s DNA database. The potential for such matches continues to grow along with the database.

There are literally thousands of rape cases in which DNA evidence collected from victims has yet to be tested. Indeed, the state continues to collect DNA samples from far more criminal cases than it is able to test and look for matches in the database.

Cost is largely to blame for that backlog. A single DNA analysis ranges from $500 to $1,500, depending on the quality of the DNA evidence available for testing.

The state received a bit of federal help in chipping away at that backlog a couple of months ago. The federal Stranger Rape DNA Project, launched the first of March, will enable state crime labs to send DNA samples in rape cases with no known suspect to a private lab in Dallas for speedier results.

The state Supreme Court decision ensures that Washington can continue to make good use of those results. It was a decision we both hoped for and expected. The law has passed constitutional muster in every state court. Washington’s highest court gave the law a strong, 7-2 endorsement.

That the opinion was not unanimous is somewhat surprising. Convicts, in fact, have little expectation of privacy. As Justice Charles Johnson wrote in the majority opinion, “The state already collects from convicted persons identifying information such as photographs and fingerprints; a DNA sample is simply another piece of identifying information.”