Letters to the Editor
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Why Not?
I have no problem with extracting & storing DNA for all people arrested for violent crimes. It should also be true for people arrested on breaking & entering charges. Often, theft and rape go hand in hand. As for the naysayers, if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. I'd volunteer my DNA just to help create a "sibling" DNA database. I've never been arrested for any type of crime and neither have my family members, but it's a start. I believe that BTK was arrested partly due to his daughter medical DNA obtained from her college's clinic...and she was fine with it.
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automating criminal justice
Automation is great...except it is so error prone. It's not so much that the investigators will plant evidence, it's more a question of how they will approach investigating the crime. If everyone's DNA is on file, the investigation process will become inverted: DNA matches will be run on all the bits of physical evidence found at the crime scene and the rest of the facts will be fixed to fit the person. I can just see a CSI robot vacuming everything to collect all the little scraps of human anatomy, running the test, and then spitting out the name of the guilty party. Don't think so? Just look at what happened with that unfortunate lawyer from Oregon whose fingerprints were "matched" to the Madrid bombing. How is it possible that someone who had nothing to do with anything got linked to the crime?
There will be millions of DNA records in various databses, running on faulty hardware, being mangled by buggy software, transmitted over error-prone networks and so on, and on, and on, down the rabbit hole of automation. It will be just like in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil"...
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Must be a full moon out or something
Hello? If you are a suspect they will take your DNA. They already do that without a conviction. All you have to be is a suspect.
It's just wrong to suggest that DNA testing is some kind of CSI flimflammery. Like I said, it's not better or worse than fingerprints--it's just an identification tool.
And if you guys are honestly thinking that people will actually murder or rape somebody just to set up an elaborate frame-up using somebody else's hair and fluids, etc.---then you really do watch too much CSI.
Again, I don't really see what this law would change besides that it would make a standard procedure out of something that is already done. If it had been a standard procedure instead of whatever-if-we-feel-like-it, this rapist and possibly many others would have been caught much earlier.
And please remember that DNA testing was one of the things that cleared the Duke Lacrosse players before the case went to trial. Should we have waited to do DNA testing until after a conviction?
I can't believe you prople don't know how this works.
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I always take the common sense approach
Can you clarify what you mean by "abandoning a fetus in a dumpster"? A fetus a woman miscarried? Self-aborted? A born child (then it's not a fetus, is it?)?
Common sense suggests a crime is committed if:
- A woman harms herself with the intent of having her body reject and miscarry her baby
- A woman self aborts and dumps the baby
- A woman births a baby naturally and then abandons it
All three should be crimes, as should any abortion occurring after about the mid point of a pregnancy that is not being performed in order to save the mother from death.
Any fetus, once out of the body, is automatically a baby, or it would seem, as long as the child can be kept alive with modern technology. But this 'fetus/baby' dichotomy is the typical kind of semantic crap feminists love to play to try to weasel out of laws and convictions.
Is rape rape? Maybe men can and should semantically rearrange the word until rape becomes loving sex.
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DNA type *everyone*.
It's bullshit to take DNA from people who are arrested, but not convicted. Innocent until proven guilty. What would be much better is to take guilt or innocence out of the equation, DNA type *everyone*, and build in safeguards to protect the rights of the innocent (such as: your DNA may not be subpoenaed without probable cause pertaining to a violent crime; exact match is required for conviction unless there is other circumstantial evidence that suggests you are guilty, evidence that before DNA might have been considered substantive in and of itself; a substantive alibi overrules DNA, for instance, if you were at work when the crime was committed and several of your co-workers can testify to seeing you there, then it doesn't matter how close the match is; DNA may only be used in a "fishing expedition" when there is reason to suspect the people being fished, for example, if a woman is raped in a small town it may make sense to hit the database for all the men in the town but it would be unacceptable to search the entire United States database for the rapist), and so on.
It's true that DNA evidence is currently subject to abuse, but so is everything, and the major form of abuse going on right now is that the bias of the cops and the justice system ends up convicting innocent men while letting the guilty go free. Catching more of the guilty *would* save more innocent men, all by itself. Putting away stranger-rapists after their very first rape would not only save all the women that the guy would have gone on to rape, but it will also save any men who might have been wrongly accused of raping one of those women, given that eyewitness testimony is bad at the *best* of times and while you're being raped is often a very bad time to be able to remember faces later on.
(And yeah, it would also identify the mother of dead abandoned babies, which *is* a crime. Identifying the mother of dead *fetuses*, of course, would be a total waste of time, as a fetus is an unborn child or a child miscarried or aborted at a point where it could not survive outside the womb, and if you find one of them, it's either the product of an abortion or a miscarriage and either way, not a crime.)
It's not that I think the innocent have nothing to fear. It's that I think the innocent have plenty to fear *right now*. You can be framed because a cop thought you were guilty and subjected you to harsh interrogation until you thought you might be and falsely confessed; how will DNA evidence make this problem *worse?*