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As I say in a comment elsewhere in this thread, I find the dissent on this extremely illuminating and tend to agree with it. One thing the court can't consider
by JunkDNA 13y ago
As I say in a comment elsewhere in this thread, I find the dissent on this extremely illuminating and tend to agree with it. One thing the court can't consider right now (since it's a hypothetical future and that's rightly not their business) is that some day, DNA sequencing is going to be dirt cheap and super fast. It is only a matter of time. When that happens, what will the court think about the police driving around hoovering up all the hair and cells you shed every day? You know, just to solve those cold cases to see if anyone turns up?
People get all worked up over automated license plate readers but the thought of the above happening makes GATTACA (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) look like Disneyland.
- rayiner 13y ago> When that happens, what will the court think about the police driving around hoovering up all the hair and cells you shed every day? You know, just to solve those cold cases to see if anyone turns up? What, in itself, would be wrong with that, as long as the police were catching people who were actually guilty? This is kind of the same thing as the fear of self-driving cars. Why would it be better to depend on things like eyewitness testimony (which is hugely unreliable, especially for cross-race identifications), when we have much less fallible DNA evidence?
- JunkDNA 13y agoWell let's make it super-easy and nip this in the bud: let's just store a DNA sequence of everyone when they are born. That way, we can skip the whole hoovering up business and for sure identify people. Are you ok with that?
- DanBC 13y agoWe need to be clear about why that doesn't work because it's exactly what some people want. Appeals to natural justice are correct, but won't persuade those people. We need to work out the problems with false negatives and false positives and tying an ID to a DNA string because that might persuade a few people about how bad the idea is.
- rayiner 13y agoSure. I can easily imagine it doing more good than harm. The fact is that police and juries, in the absence of very precise evidence, don't just go "geez, guess we gotta leave this one unsolved." Not with families and communities devastated by rapes, murders, etc. If they don't have precise evidence, like DNA, they will depend on less precise evidence, like finger prints or hair samples, or god forbid eyewitness testimony.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jellicle 13y agoThe idea that DNA evidence is infallible is pernicious and wrong. Google "lab tech falsified results" to see literally hundreds of thousands of criminal cases in the U.S. alone, where the supposed infallibility of lab results was used to convict innocent people.
- rayiner 13y agoWhile DNA evidence is not infallible, there are not "hundreds of thousands" of cases of faulty convictions based on DNA.
- jellicle 13y agoOnly because there haven't been that many cases based on it. As it becomes more routine, we will discover - as we have with other lab results - that DNA tests have often been falsified, by lazy or incompetent or corrupt lab workers, and that those test results have sent thousands of people to prison - as is true with other sorts of lab tests, often drug tests, as Googling will plainly show you.
- Zigurd 13y agohttp://www.npr.org/2013/03/14/174269211/mass-crime-lab-scandal-reverberates-across-state http://www.npr.org/2013/03/14/174269211/mass-crime-lab-scand... One chemist. one lab. 34,000 cases of falsified evidence. What would you bet on: One bad apple? Or are there more of these throughout the country?
- darkarmani 13y ago> What, in itself, would be wrong with that, as long as the police were catching people who were actually guilty? You do know that argument could be used for giving lie detector tests on every citizen every day, right? Other than tracking the movements and associations of every citizen, there isn't much more wrong with it.
- rayiner 13y agoLie detector tests are: 1) invasive; 2) highly unreliable.
- darkarmani 13y agoMore unreliable than the hypothetical DNA vacuum cleaner? I'm sure if they can do that, they can come up with a more accurate lie detector test as well. I find check swabs invasive as well. If they can get the DNA in other ways that aren't invasive, I'm not sure why they have to be cleared to do it in this manner.
- tptacek 13y agoYes, much, much less reliable; this is like comparing blood chemical tests to phrenology.
- darkarmani 13y agoWhich one is like phrenology? ;) The DNA vacuum doesn't exist. I'm assuming if we had the ability to go around vacuuming people's DNA and testing all of it, we could have a more reliable lie detector test. And what do you mean unreliable? Maury Povich uses them all the time on his show! ;)
- rmc 13y agoNot the same thing. Lie detectors don't actually work, and take up people's time. Following people around reveals anything a person is embarassed to reveal publically. DNA analysis doesn't take up the target's time, works better than lie detectors, and reveals much less embarassing facts about the target.
- pyre 13y ago| catching people who were actually guilty Not every crime deserves to be punished. For example, a conviction of, "lying to a Federal officer," for providing false information to an undercover Federal officer.
- rayiner 13y agoEven assuming that's true, the universe of crimes you're talking about is probably mostly disjoint from the universe of crimes that involve "cold cases" where DNA evidence could help.