I would like to think that Bricker merely hasn’t finished considering the issue. Unfortunately, it has fallen to modern conservatives to be the defenders of our liberty. It seems to me that freedom, which they are so proud to spread around the world, begins at home.
You didn’t answer the question I asked in post #2, Bricker, so let me ask again and point out that your OP is imcoplete, at best, and incorrect, at worst. Prop 69 mandates taking DNA samples from people charged with felonies, not just convicted of felonies. Do you advocate the taking of DNA samples for people who are merely charged, but not arrested?
I can’t imagine that anyone would object to a DNA database of convicted felons.
[QUOTE=John Mace Do you advocate the taking of DNA samples for people who are merely charged, but not arrested?.[/QUOTE]
That should have been “charged, but not convicted”.
If I see a man crumple up a ten dollar bill and deliberately throw it in the trash, I believe I am ethically entitled to keep it.
Is that what will happen with the proposition you support? Will Mr. Smith, who has wronged no one, go to the courthouse voluntarily and drop off his lock of hair? As I said in another post, modern conservatives are all that remain to guard our civil liberties, now that modern liberals have abbrogated that duty. It is a responsibility taken seriously by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr. Freedom doesn’t come from Constitutions. The Soviet Constitution guaranteed far more freedom than the US Constitution guarantees. Freedom comes from people like you, and other major party players, who have the power and the volition to guard it for the rest of us.
While the idea of taking a dna sample from people that are charged with a crime feels a little hinky, I’m still not sure how exactly this is a violation of civil rights or a slippery slope in any way, shape, or form.
Yeah, it could be used to frame you for a crime. That’s been happening without dna evidence for how long now?
It could be used to find out things about you, but how much do we really know about dna reading? We can match samples up, but how much is realistically going to be looked for and/or found by a police department lab?
If anyone has a free second, could they tell me how potentially bad this could be?
Your assertation about fingerprint matching is pretty off-base, mainly because even if a detective could do that - could just look at someone’s hands and work out the fingerprint pattern and whether or not it matches invisible fingerprints at a crime scene - it wouldn’t stand up in court. Comparative matches must be made between two like objects - so visualised fingerprint residues at the scene can usually only be compared against inked impressions. For one thing, they’re oriented properly - fingerprints on your fingers appear “the other way around” compared to a fingerprint you leave behind on a window, or whatever.
Secondly, it’s darned hard to do that! Even in the best of lighting my ridges aren’t very easily distinguishable, and the older you get, the shallower your ridges get (due to keratinisation effects).
Finally - and the most relevant thing to this thread - DNA can be taken from hair. It’s mitochondrial DNA so it only identifies maternal lineage, but it can be obtained. If the hair has its follicle sheath still attached, e.g. it was torn from the person’s body, then you can get nuclear DNA as well. Dry skin cells will yield enough DNA, when combined with PCR amplification, to obtain a profile. Saliva will contain enough dried epithelial cells that it can be done. Dry blood stains can yield excellent DNA for profiles. Dried, dead sperm heads will give enough DNA for a profile. It doesn’t always have to be invasive.
Granted, it is in the case of obtaining live samples, it often is invasive - if you consider the buccal swab to be invasive, as many do. (I don’t, but then again, I’ve done so many of them in the course of my forensic science degree that it’s just “another day, another dollar” for me.)
Bricker can correct me if I’m wrong here, but this is what I’ve picked up during my legal studies module of my forensics degree.
I don’t know what the proposition itself mandates, but a DNA database is very similar to a fingerprints database, so I’ll tell you a bit about how we use our fingerprints database.
The database includes fingerprints of all people who have ever been “booked”. We compare the fingerprints from the crime scene against all of these fingerprints in the database. This gives us a list of (ideally) 10-15 possible matches. A fingerprint technician then examines the images from those 10-15 matches more closely to identify the one that is most likely to be from the same person as the scene sample.
This is enough evidence to obtain a warrant to obtain a new set of fingerprints from the identified individual. (And probably also for searching their home/car/etc. as well.) These NEW fingerprints are then compared directly to the crime scene fingerprints to ensure that the two sets of fingerprints match. When the evidence is presented at court, only this comparison is used to make the case that the fingerprints at the crime scene are from the defendant.
This distinction is required because telling the jury that you got the reference fingerprints from a criminal records database will “prejudice” the jury - you’re saying, “He has a past criminal record”, and that often leads to, “so he probably committed this crime” in many peoples’ minds. We try to avoid unnecessary prejudice wherever possible, so that the strength of the scientific evidence speaks for itself.
I would imagine that the same concerns of prejudice would exist with a DNA database as proposed in Prop 69. It is more than easy to justify the cost of another DNA sample to be profiled, if it avoids retrials or bad publicity based upon the prejudicial nature of saying in court, “His DNA profile was already in a database of people previously charged or convicted of an earlier crime.” The cost of DNA profiles is no longer prohibitive (unless it’s mitochondrial DNA, which is more complicated as it must be sequenced, not profiled, in many cases).
Personally, I have no objection to this proposition, given that the law is very clear on the following:
-
Once profiles are obtained, the DNA is discarded, and only the profile is kept.
– You can’t identify a person’s physical attributes from a profile. It’s based upon junk DNA, (DNA which doesn’t code for any gene products), because those regions of the genome are not under selective pressure, so they are more likely to mutate without preventing development of the zygote, and thus we see more discriminatory power in this “junk” DNA than in gene-producing DNA. -
Profiles are labelled with an identifying number (identifying the person who gave the sample) and the proprietary kit used in the profiling process. The records which tie identifying numbers to actual individuals are kept in a centralised location and are not available until you have used the database software to establish that there is a match between a “scene sample” and the database sample.
– This would make it pretty difficult for a cop to fake a match/frame a person - first of all, the cop can’t plant the sample that was used for the profile at a crime scene, because that sample has been destroyed (see above). Secondly, the cop has no way of knowing which of the records corresponds to his “pet suspect” UNTIL forensic scientists have obtained a match on the database with a scene sample and have obtained the name from the centralised repository. -
The database match is only used to procure a warrant to search the named individual & obtain a fresh sample of his/her DNA. It is this new, fresh sample of DNA that is compared to the scene sample and which acts as evidence in court.
– Again, to prevent prejudicial evidence concerns in court.
If these protocol were followed I’d be happy to contribute my DNA to the database and I feel – although I know many will disagree – that this would be non-invasive enough, and sufficiently stripped of individual details, that I could support it being a database of all individuals, including innocent people. YMMV, and I’m sure it does. 
Most of the work that has been done in “reading DNA” is in relation to cancer and other degenerative diseases, profiling the genes which are being expressed in diseased cells and comparing them to the genes being expressed in non-diseased cells. Other popular applications are in canvassing for adverse drug interactions. This is all a very new field of research, known as proteomics or pharmacogenomics, and it really began in about 1998 when DNA chips - small squares of silicon with hundreds to hundreds-of-thousands of probes attached to them, allowing the whole genome to be probed with ease.
That said, forensics would love to get into this field, but it would take SO much work to determine all the factors that go into one’s height, eye colour, hair colour, etc., and the new technology is currently being used for a LOT more important and noble pursuits. Forensic scientists would pretty much have to do all this research themselves, and it’d be pretty costly, time-consuming, and rigorous work. However, forensic scientists have identified a single nucleotide polymorphism (a region of the DNA that differs by the identity of only one base) that may be either linked to or the cause of red hair, so that’s a step towards the direction of DNA microarrays in forensics.
It’s a loooong way before we can analyse the genome to get any useful identifying information out of it. A looong way. At this stage, it’d almost be easier to clone the DNA than to try to analyse the genome like that! 
Yes, that’s true. I don’t see why, though, this is a problem.
Well, that’s indeed where we disagree.
In today’s society, the police may break down your door and search your house, as long as they first convince a judge that they will PROBABLY find evidence of a crime there.
That rule exists because we weigh the obvious desirability of the security of your home against the need of society to protect itself from crime, and the competing tension between those two ideals creates the result we have today.
The exact same standard – PROBABLE CAUSE – is required to arrest you, and (under this proposal) take your DNA.
Why is the former acceptable (if it is) and the latter not?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the whole thing. Does or does not the proposition allow DNA to be taken from people who are merely suspected of a crime — along the same lines as magisterial declaration of enemy combatant status? (Also, since you brought it up, are police required to repair damage to your door and house if they turn out to be wrong? If not, why not?)
No, we can’t “read” DNA at this point and tell much about a person, but what about 20 years from now? But my main objection is simply that one is presumed innocent until found guilty.
The proposal is that persons charged with a crime must submit a DNA sample. In legal parlance, the answer to your “mere suspicion” question is no. Mere suspicion is not sufficient to arrest or charge someone. Probable cause is the required standard to be met when charging someone with a crime. It’s unclear to me if you met “mere suspicion” as opposed to probable cause, or “mere suspicion” as opposed to a final criminal conviction.
The answer to your second question is no, police are not required to repair damage to your door if they were wrong. Depending on how wrong they were, they may do so… but there is no country-wide requirement. (By “how wrong they were” I mean to distinguish between mistakenly knocking down the door of the house across the street from the one they meant to search vs. not finding crystal meth, but finding a large stockpile of the necessary ingredients to make it; restitution is quite likely in the former case).
Thanks for the responses, but you forgot the “why not?”.
Sorry.
If a strong wind blows a tree over and it knocks down your door, you are required to replace it yourself. The reason is that no one did anything wrong to you – it just happened.
If the police act reasonably, within the law, then they haven’t done anything wrong to you either.
If they act negligently - misreading an address, for instance – then recompense should be forthcoming.
Yes, we must by all means work against the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
All right, Bricker. I wouldn’t say that you have formulated an argument sufficiently compelling to change my mind; however, I believe that I can now understand your rationale. Still, I am disappointed that there are no more champions of freedom. But that’s another issue, and is being addressed in another thread.
The problem I see with a DNA database is if that database could be searched for non-crime related information. If for instance a gene is found to cause a very high cancer risk, how can we be sure that insurance companies cannot do a search on the database to find people with that gene in order to deny them medical insurance? In many ways a database of everyones genetic ‘fingerprint’ would be useful in solving crimes, and in showing just how unique or not this ‘fingerprint’ really is, but regulating it sufficiently to ensure peoples privacy is maintained is difficult and maybe impossible.
There’s no money in it.
This was addressed in the GQ thread Polerius started, and linked to, about halfway through page 1. It is very unlikely the database will contain the entire genome of each individual who is forced to contribute. Current DNA matching technology samples from 13-15 spots in the genome and uses just those segments of DNA to do comparisons. Unless a particular person happened to have the gene which codes for a medical condition in one of those loci then the data in the database wouldn’t reveal it at all.
Right now the barrier to abuse such as you fear may occur is technological and practical. It is not practical to store the entire genome of every individual in the database. Even if full data is being stored it is not practical to examine all those genes for the sequences which would indicate genetic predispositions for various conditions. I am not privy to all the details of what the CA database does or does not store, but the likelyhood of it being used in this manner(if indeed it can be used in this manner at all), at least in the near future, is quite low.
Enjoy,
Steven
I thought you were some kinda Libertarian, Bricker. A DNA database kept by the government seems pretty antithetical to Libertarianism. 