Monday, December 28. 2009
State agrees to destroy controversial infant blood samplesWednesday, October 28. 2009
UK: One in 10 people in DNA database
By Tom Whitehead
Telegraph | Police forces in England and Wales have taken the profiles of 5.5 million people, meaning the proportion of the population on the system has passed a tenth for the first time.
Overall, when profiles taken in Scotland and Northern Ireland are included, almost six million people have now been stored on what is the largest DNA database in the world.
The landmark came as a poll showed eight in 10 people believe a Big Brother state in the UK has eroded freedoms and that the Government cannot be trusted with personal information.
Last week, ministers were forced in to a last minute climb-down over plans to hold on to the DNA of innocent people for 12 years when it dropped plans to include the proposal in an amendment to legislation currently passing through Parliament.
Home Office figures show a total of 5,910,172 profiles are on the national DNA database.
Of those, some 5,532,847 were stored by police forces in England and Wales – the equivalent of more than one in 10 of the population of the two home nations of 54,440,000.
It comes as the row over keeping the profiles of innocents on the database deepens.
The Home Office had proposed a 12 year limit for retaining DNA profiles of those not convicted of offences after a blanket policy to hold on to them indefinitely was ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights.
However, the new policy, contained in an amendment to the Policing and Crime Bill, was dropped last week at the final moment in the face of growing criticism.
A new Bill containing a further set of proposals will now be included in the Queen's Speech next month.
The move represented an about-turn by the Home Office and campaigners hope it will lead to a significant watering down of the proposals.
Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, demanded that his details be erased after no charges were brought against him following his arrest over Whitehall leaks last year.
It also emerged last week that the number of crimes solved with a DNA match has fallen by a fifth despite more than a million new profiles having been added over the past two years.
James Brokenshire, the shadow home office minister, said: "The Government has been obsessed with growing the DNA database for the sake of it regardless of guilt or innocence.
"Despite being told that their approach is unlawful they have been dragging their feet about doing anything about it. Just how many more DNA profiles of the innocent have to be added before the Government is prepared to act?”
A Home Office spokesman said: "The DNA database is a vital crime fighting tool, identifying 390,000 crimes with DNA matches between April 1998 and September 2008 and providing the police with a lead on the possible identity of the offender. Last year a total of 17,614 crimes, including 83 homicides and 184 rapes, were detected in which a DNA match was available.
"We have now completed a public consultation on proposals to ensure the right people are on the database as well as considering when people should come off. Those proposals were grounded in the research and allowed us to respond to the judgement of the European Court of Human Rights both swiftly and effectively.”
A separate poll for campaign group Big Brother Watch found 79 per cent of the public believe freedoms are being eroded by a Big Brother state while 86 per cent said the Government cannot be trusted to keep personal data safe.
Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “We are the victims of ever more intrusive policies, pushing more and more into the details of our lives.
“The Government doesn’t seem to care that Big Brother Britain has been rejected by the vast majority of people who live here.
“They continue to pursue expensive and invasive surveillance methods that serve only to create criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
Telegraph | Police forces in England and Wales have taken the profiles of 5.5 million people, meaning the proportion of the population on the system has passed a tenth for the first time.Overall, when profiles taken in Scotland and Northern Ireland are included, almost six million people have now been stored on what is the largest DNA database in the world.
The landmark came as a poll showed eight in 10 people believe a Big Brother state in the UK has eroded freedoms and that the Government cannot be trusted with personal information.
Last week, ministers were forced in to a last minute climb-down over plans to hold on to the DNA of innocent people for 12 years when it dropped plans to include the proposal in an amendment to legislation currently passing through Parliament.
Home Office figures show a total of 5,910,172 profiles are on the national DNA database.
Of those, some 5,532,847 were stored by police forces in England and Wales – the equivalent of more than one in 10 of the population of the two home nations of 54,440,000.
It comes as the row over keeping the profiles of innocents on the database deepens.
The Home Office had proposed a 12 year limit for retaining DNA profiles of those not convicted of offences after a blanket policy to hold on to them indefinitely was ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights.
However, the new policy, contained in an amendment to the Policing and Crime Bill, was dropped last week at the final moment in the face of growing criticism.
A new Bill containing a further set of proposals will now be included in the Queen's Speech next month.
The move represented an about-turn by the Home Office and campaigners hope it will lead to a significant watering down of the proposals.
Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, demanded that his details be erased after no charges were brought against him following his arrest over Whitehall leaks last year.
It also emerged last week that the number of crimes solved with a DNA match has fallen by a fifth despite more than a million new profiles having been added over the past two years.
James Brokenshire, the shadow home office minister, said: "The Government has been obsessed with growing the DNA database for the sake of it regardless of guilt or innocence.
"Despite being told that their approach is unlawful they have been dragging their feet about doing anything about it. Just how many more DNA profiles of the innocent have to be added before the Government is prepared to act?”
A Home Office spokesman said: "The DNA database is a vital crime fighting tool, identifying 390,000 crimes with DNA matches between April 1998 and September 2008 and providing the police with a lead on the possible identity of the offender. Last year a total of 17,614 crimes, including 83 homicides and 184 rapes, were detected in which a DNA match was available.
"We have now completed a public consultation on proposals to ensure the right people are on the database as well as considering when people should come off. Those proposals were grounded in the research and allowed us to respond to the judgement of the European Court of Human Rights both swiftly and effectively.”
A separate poll for campaign group Big Brother Watch found 79 per cent of the public believe freedoms are being eroded by a Big Brother state while 86 per cent said the Government cannot be trusted to keep personal data safe.
Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “We are the victims of ever more intrusive policies, pushing more and more into the details of our lives.
“The Government doesn’t seem to care that Big Brother Britain has been rejected by the vast majority of people who live here.
“They continue to pursue expensive and invasive surveillance methods that serve only to create criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
Tuesday, September 22. 2009
EU funding 'Orwellian' artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for "abnormal behaviour"
By Ian Johnston
Telegraph | A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as "agents" to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.
Its main objectives include the "automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence".
Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a "sinister step" for any country, adding that it was "positively chilling" on a European scale.
The Indect research, which began this year, comes as the EU is pressing ahead with an expansion of its role in fighting crime, terrorism and managing migration, increasing its budget in these areas by 13.5% to nearly £900 million.
The European Commission is calling for a "common culture" of law enforcement to be developed across the EU and for a third of police officers – more than 50,000 in the UK alone – to be given training in European affairs within the next five years.
According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple.
Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded "Orwellian" and raised serious questions about individual liberty.
"This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them," he said.
"The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked 'is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?'"
Miss Chakrabarti said: "Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.
"It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling."
According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include "to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence".
It talks of the "construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive".
York University's computer science department website details how its task is to develop "computational linguistic techniques for information gathering and learning from the web".
"Our focus is on novel techniques for word sense induction, entity resolution, relationship mining, social network analysis [and] sentiment analysis," it says.
A separate EU-funded research project, called Adabts – the Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces – has received nearly £3 million. Its is based in Sweden but partners include the UK Home Office and BAE Systems.
It is seeking to develop models of "suspicious behaviour" so these can be automatically detected using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people's voices, the way their bodies move and track individuals within crowds.
Project coordinator Dr Jorgen Ahlberg, of the Swedish Defence Research Agency, said this would simply help CCTV operators notice when trouble was starting.
"People usually don't start to fight from one second to another," he said. "They start by arguing and pushing each other. It's not that 'oh you are pushing each other, you should be arrested', it's to alert an operator that something is going on.
"If it's a shopping mall, you could send a security guard into the vicinity and things [a fight] maybe wouldn't happen."
Open Europe believes intelligence gathered by Indect and other such systems could be used by a little-known body, the EU Joint Situation Centre (SitCen), which it claims is "effectively the beginning of an EU secret service". Critics have said it could develop into "Europe's CIA".
The dossier says: "The EU's Joint Situation Centre (SitCen) was originally established in order to monitor and assess worldwide events and situations on a 24-hour basis with a focus on potential crisis regions, terrorism and WMD-proliferation.
"However, since 2005, SitCen has been used to share counter-terrorism information.
"An increased role for SitCen should be of concern since the body is shrouded in so much secrecy.
"The expansion of what is effectively the beginning of an EU 'secret service' raises fundamental questions of political oversight in the member states."
Superintendent Gerry Murray, of the PSNI, said the force's main role would be to test whether the system, which he said could be operated on a countrywide or European level, was a worthwhile tool for the police.
"A lot of it is very academic and very science-driven [at the moment]. Our budgets are shrinking, our human resources are shrinking and we are looking for IT technology that will help us five years down the line in reducing crime and combating criminal gangs," he said.
"Within this Project Indect there is an ethical board which will be looked at: is it permissible within the legislation of the country who may use it, who oversees it and is it human rights compliant."
Telegraph | A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as "agents" to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.Its main objectives include the "automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence".
Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a "sinister step" for any country, adding that it was "positively chilling" on a European scale.
The Indect research, which began this year, comes as the EU is pressing ahead with an expansion of its role in fighting crime, terrorism and managing migration, increasing its budget in these areas by 13.5% to nearly £900 million.
The European Commission is calling for a "common culture" of law enforcement to be developed across the EU and for a third of police officers – more than 50,000 in the UK alone – to be given training in European affairs within the next five years.
According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple.
Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded "Orwellian" and raised serious questions about individual liberty.
"This is all pretty scary stuff in my book. These projects would involve a huge invasion of privacy and citizens need to ask themselves whether the EU should be spending their taxes on them," he said.
"The EU lacks sufficient checks and balances and there is no evidence that anyone has ever asked 'is this actually in the best interests of our citizens?'"
Miss Chakrabarti said: "Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society.
"It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling."
According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include "to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence".
It talks of the "construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer systems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive".
York University's computer science department website details how its task is to develop "computational linguistic techniques for information gathering and learning from the web".
"Our focus is on novel techniques for word sense induction, entity resolution, relationship mining, social network analysis [and] sentiment analysis," it says.
A separate EU-funded research project, called Adabts – the Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces – has received nearly £3 million. Its is based in Sweden but partners include the UK Home Office and BAE Systems.
It is seeking to develop models of "suspicious behaviour" so these can be automatically detected using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people's voices, the way their bodies move and track individuals within crowds.
Project coordinator Dr Jorgen Ahlberg, of the Swedish Defence Research Agency, said this would simply help CCTV operators notice when trouble was starting.
"People usually don't start to fight from one second to another," he said. "They start by arguing and pushing each other. It's not that 'oh you are pushing each other, you should be arrested', it's to alert an operator that something is going on.
"If it's a shopping mall, you could send a security guard into the vicinity and things [a fight] maybe wouldn't happen."
Open Europe believes intelligence gathered by Indect and other such systems could be used by a little-known body, the EU Joint Situation Centre (SitCen), which it claims is "effectively the beginning of an EU secret service". Critics have said it could develop into "Europe's CIA".
The dossier says: "The EU's Joint Situation Centre (SitCen) was originally established in order to monitor and assess worldwide events and situations on a 24-hour basis with a focus on potential crisis regions, terrorism and WMD-proliferation.
"However, since 2005, SitCen has been used to share counter-terrorism information.
"An increased role for SitCen should be of concern since the body is shrouded in so much secrecy.
"The expansion of what is effectively the beginning of an EU 'secret service' raises fundamental questions of political oversight in the member states."
Superintendent Gerry Murray, of the PSNI, said the force's main role would be to test whether the system, which he said could be operated on a countrywide or European level, was a worthwhile tool for the police.
"A lot of it is very academic and very science-driven [at the moment]. Our budgets are shrinking, our human resources are shrinking and we are looking for IT technology that will help us five years down the line in reducing crime and combating criminal gangs," he said.
"Within this Project Indect there is an ethical board which will be looked at: is it permissible within the legislation of the country who may use it, who oversees it and is it human rights compliant."
Thursday, August 20. 2009
DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show
By Andrew Pollack
NY Times | Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.
The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.
“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”
Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.
The planting of fabricated DNA evidence at a crime scene is only one implication of the findings. A potential invasion of personal privacy is another.
Using some of the same techniques, it may be possible to scavenge anyone’s DNA from a discarded drinking cup or cigarette butt and turn it into a saliva sample that could be submitted to a genetic testing company that measures ancestry or the risk of getting various diseases. Celebrities might have to fear “genetic paparazzi,” said Gail H. Javitt of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, said the findings were worrisome.
“DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,” she said. “We’re creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.”
John M. Butler, leader of the human identity testing project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he was “impressed at how well they were able to fabricate the fake DNA profiles.” However, he added, “I think your average criminal wouldn’t be able to do something like that.”
The scientists fabricated DNA samples two ways. One required a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or drinking cup. They amplified the tiny sample into a large quantity of DNA using a standard technique called whole genome amplification.
Of course, a drinking cup or piece of hair might itself be left at a crime scene to frame someone, but blood or saliva may be more believable.
The authors of the paper took blood from a woman and centrifuged it to remove the white cells, which contain DNA. To the remaining red cells they added DNA that had been amplified from a man’s hair.
Since red cells do not contain DNA, all of the genetic material in the blood sample was from the man. The authors sent it to a leading American forensics laboratory, which analyzed it as if it were a normal sample of a man’s blood.
The other technique relied on DNA profiles, stored in law enforcement databases as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person’s genome.
From a pooled sample of many people’s DNA, the scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. They said that a library of 425 different DNA snippets would be enough to cover every conceivable profile.
Nucleix’s test to tell if a sample has been fabricated relies on the fact that amplified DNA — which would be used in either deception — is not methylated, meaning it lacks certain molecules that are attached to the DNA at specific points, usually to inactivate genes.
NY Times | Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.
“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”
Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.
The planting of fabricated DNA evidence at a crime scene is only one implication of the findings. A potential invasion of personal privacy is another.
Using some of the same techniques, it may be possible to scavenge anyone’s DNA from a discarded drinking cup or cigarette butt and turn it into a saliva sample that could be submitted to a genetic testing company that measures ancestry or the risk of getting various diseases. Celebrities might have to fear “genetic paparazzi,” said Gail H. Javitt of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, said the findings were worrisome.
“DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,” she said. “We’re creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.”
John M. Butler, leader of the human identity testing project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he was “impressed at how well they were able to fabricate the fake DNA profiles.” However, he added, “I think your average criminal wouldn’t be able to do something like that.”
The scientists fabricated DNA samples two ways. One required a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or drinking cup. They amplified the tiny sample into a large quantity of DNA using a standard technique called whole genome amplification.
Of course, a drinking cup or piece of hair might itself be left at a crime scene to frame someone, but blood or saliva may be more believable.
The authors of the paper took blood from a woman and centrifuged it to remove the white cells, which contain DNA. To the remaining red cells they added DNA that had been amplified from a man’s hair.
Since red cells do not contain DNA, all of the genetic material in the blood sample was from the man. The authors sent it to a leading American forensics laboratory, which analyzed it as if it were a normal sample of a man’s blood.
The other technique relied on DNA profiles, stored in law enforcement databases as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person’s genome.
From a pooled sample of many people’s DNA, the scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. They said that a library of 425 different DNA snippets would be enough to cover every conceivable profile.
Nucleix’s test to tell if a sample has been fabricated relies on the fact that amplified DNA — which would be used in either deception — is not methylated, meaning it lacks certain molecules that are attached to the DNA at specific points, usually to inactivate genes.
Friday, June 5. 2009
Judge Rules It Is OK to Taser for DNA SamplesBy Thomas J. Prohaska
The Buffalo News | It is legally permissible for police to zap a suspect with a Taser to obtain a DNA sample, as long as it’s not done “maliciously, or to an excessive extent, or with resulting injury,” a county judge has ruled in the first case of its kind in New York State, and possibly the nation.
Niagara County Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza decided that the DNA sample obtained Sept. 29 from Ryan S. Smith of Niagara Falls — which ties him to a shooting and a gas station robbery— is legally valid and can be used at his trial.
Smith was handcuffed and sitting on the floor of Niagara Falls Police Headquarters when he was zapped with the 50,000- volt electronic stun gun after he insisted he would not give a DNA sample.
He already had given a sample, a swab of the inside of his cheek, without protest the previous month. But police sent it to the wrong lab, where it was opened and spoiled. Prosecutors who had obtained a court order for the first sample went back to Sperrazza, who signed another order without consulting the defense.
Read full article
Wednesday, February 4. 2009
State Wants DNA Of Shoplifters
By Jennifer Sullivan
Seattle Times | Suspects arrested in cases as minor as shoplifting would have to give a DNA sample before they are even charged with a crime if a controversial proposal is approved by the Legislature.
State criminal defense groups and the American Civil Liberties Union say the House bill is unconstitutional. It would mandate that police or jail staff collect DNA from all adults and juveniles arrested on suspicion of a felony or gross misdemeanor.
More than a dozen states already allow law enforcement to collect DNA from suspects before they are convicted. Three more states, including Washington, are considering such proposals this year.
"It is good technology. It solves crimes," said Don Pierce, executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, which has long pushed for DNA tests at the time of arrest. "We take fingerprints at the time of arrest, which in many ways is a lot more intrusive."
Currently, police in Washington state collect DNA from people convicted of a felony and many misdemeanor sex-related crimes after they are sentenced. Police must get a search warrant or permission from the suspect to obtain DNA before a conviction.
The sample usually is taken by swabbing the inside of a person's cheek.
A separate bill in the Senate also would allow for DNA collection before conviction — but only after formal charges are filed.
The House bill, HB-1382, is sponsored by Rep. Mark Miloscia, D- Federal Way. He testified in support of his bill Tuesday before the Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Committee. The committee could vote on the measure as early as today.
"This bill would take the next step in the use of DNA technology to help catch individuals who have gone out and harmed people," Miloscia said.
The DNA would be submitted to the State Patrol and the FBI databases, which are used to match suspects with unsolved crimes. Under the bill, authorities would destroy samples and DNA profiles obtained from people who weren't charged, were found not guilty or whose convictions were overturned.
Miloscia said each DNA test costs $82. A rough estimate shows the program could cost $1 million over two years.
Miloscia suggested that the state could apply for federal money to help cover the cost, and legislative staff said fees charged to certain criminals also could offset the cost. Prosecutors, however, said only a small percentage of those ordered to pay the fees actually do.
Jack King, staff attorney for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Washington, D.C., said his organization has been fighting similar DNA-collection proposals since 2004.
"DNA samples reveal the most personal, private information about a person's physical and mental makeup," King said. "It is terribly unfair to an arrestee."
King said he believes that seizing biological evidence before conviction violates constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
Shankar Narayan, legislative director of the ACLU of Washington, said Miloscia's bill "takes the presumption of innocence and turns it on its head."
"The fact is that a lot of people who are arrested aren't charged with anything. Even people who are charged might never be convicted," Narayan said.
Pierce, the executive director of the sheriffs and police chiefs association, said he believes the bill's passage will hinge on funding and the ability of the Washington State Patrol to process the samples. The patrol's crime lab has long faced a backlog of work.
Sen. Debbie Regala, a Tacoma Democrat who's a sponsor of the Senate DNA bill, said routinely collecting DNA at the time of arrest is worrisome.
Unlike the House bill, which would increase the number of crimes that require DNA collection, SB-5026 would take samples only in cases already outlined under the existing state statute.
Regala expects her bill will pass through committee in the coming days. The Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys supports the Senate measure; the ACLU opposes the bill.
Monday, February 2. 2009
State Bill Allows DNA From Felony Arrestees
By Niki Kelly
Journal Gazette | Tens of thousands of Hoosiers never convicted of a crime could find their DNA in state and federal databases under a bill making its way through the Indiana Senate.
The legislation is an attempt to take the next step with a scientific advance many consider to be the best crime-fighting tool in decades. But others wonder whether government is going too far and invading the privacy rights of citizens.
“Why not just get everyone’s DNA when they are born?” asked Sen. Tim Lanane, D-Anderson. “There is still a presumption of innocence in our system.”
Testing of deoxyribonucleic acid provides a genetic blueprint shared only by identical twins.
Indiana’s DNA database began in 1996 and has slowly been expanded over the years. Law enforcement currently takes DNA samples from all convicted felons, resulting in a database with about 122,000 samples.
Police around the state then use the database to see whether it matches evidence in unsolved crimes.
About 40 percent of the time the database returns a suspect, said Major Ed Littlejohn, head of the Indiana State Police Laboratory.
Statistically, the more samples in the database the more likely a crime can be solved.
“We don’t begin to maximize the potential of DNA technology until we are actually at the stage where we are preventing crimes,” said Chris Asplen, a DNA consultant from Pennsylvania who testified last week in support of Senate Bill 24.
“The nature of serial crimes is the sooner we identify the perpetrator the sooner we prevent crime,” he said.
Only seven states have laws requiring everyone arrested for a felony to give their DNA, according to information given at last week’s hearing.
But Asplen said taking the DNA at the point of arrest – rather than conviction – can prevent crimes.
A Chicago study found that requiring DNA upon arrest could have prevented dozens of murders and rapes. For instance, Andre Crawford was arrested for felony theft in March 1993. His DNA was not taken upon his arrest.
Six months later, Crawford committed a murder and left DNA evidence at the crime scene.
Asplen said Crawford’s DNA had been in the system from the theft arrest, police could have immediately caught him after the first homicide. Instead, Crawford went on to kill 10 women.
But there is a cost to running all the DNA samples.
According to a fiscal analysis by the Legislative Services Agency, it would cost $3.8 million annually to analyze and maintain the additional DNA samples.
Currently there is a $2 DNA sample processing fee included in court costs for all Hoosiers convicted of misdemeanors or felonies. That fee would have to increase to $11 to process the new felony arrestee DNA.
“Whether you are going to get much bang for the buck is unclear,” said Larry Landis, executive director of the Indiana Public Defender Council. “We would spend millions in public funds upfront and all the savings are speculative.”
But a representative from Strand Analytical Laboratories in Indianapolis gave members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week a study that showed state and local government would save almost $20 million a year in law enforcement and judicial costs owing to the number of crimes being prevented.
Then there are the privacy concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union fought a measure last summer to expand the federal DNA database to arrestees, noting it could be a Fourth Amendment violation. This amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures.
But the author of the bill, Sen. Joe Zakas, D-Granger, said initial court rulings have upheld the arrestee laws as constitutional.
In the only challenge to reach the state Supreme Court level, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the taking of DNA upon arrest “is analogous to the taking of a suspect’s fingerprints upon arrest and was not an unlawful search under the Fourth Amendment.”
Zakas and members of the committee last week did amend Senate Bill 24 to include a provision allowing those whose cases never result in formal charges or were later dismissed or acquitted to expunge the DNA from the database.
The process was described as “fairly” automatic, although the person would have to send a request to the Indiana State Police with supporting documentation.
“The person falsely accused ought not bear any burden,” Landis said. “It’s just another hoop to jump through. If you get dismissed, there should not only be an automatic expungement, there should be an apology.”
Sen. John Broden, D-South Bend, voted for the bill but wants to tweak it so the removal is more automatic and people don’t fall through the cracks.
Littlejohn said the state police might have to conduct more than 100 expungements a day under the law, something that would “overwhelm” the lab.
The high number is because 40 percent of cases statewide are dismissed, Landis said. Also, some people are arrested but not formally charged, and others who are charged with felonies later plead guilty to misdemeanors.
In comparison, there are few convictions that are overturned or vacated annually that would require the DNA to be removed.
Landis did say the public defender council has previously supported the general idea of the database, when convictions are entered and the presumption of innocence is gone. An added feature is that the DNA database can be used to exonerate people.
“It cannot only convict the guilty but it can, and has, freed the innocent,” said Sen. Richard Bray, R-Martinsville.
The bill passed out of committee 7-2 last week and now must go to the Senate Appropriations Committee because of its price tag.
Thursday, January 1. 2009
Court: Religious Objection Won't Stop DNA Sampling
By Jesse J. Holland
AP | A federal appeals court on Tuesday refused to stop the government from taking DNA from a prisoner who claims the process would violate his religious beliefs.
Russell Kaemmerling, who is in the Federal Correctional Institution in Seagoville, Texas on a felony wire fraud conviction, sued in 2006 to stop the Federal Bureau of Prisons from taking a DNA sample from him.
Federal law requires felons give a DNA sample to the Federal Bureau of Prisons to be kept in a national law enforcement database. Officers then use the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, to try and solve crimes by matching evidence from crime scenes to known offenders.
Kaemmerling claimed the collection violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as well as the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution, saying the collection and retention of his DNA information is "tantamount to laying the foundation for the rise of the anti-Christ."
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton ruled against Kaemmerling, saying only that the prisoner had not exhausted all of the remedies available inside the prison system.
But on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit added that Kaemmerling's claim that submitting to DNA sampling, collection and storage would be repugnant to his strongly held religious beliefs was not enough to stop the collection.
"The government's extraction, analysis and storage of Kaemmerling's DNA information does not call for Kaemmerling to modify his religious behavior in any way — it involves no action or forbearance on his part, nor does it otherwise interfere with any religious act in which he engages," the three-judge panel said. "Although the government's activities with his fluid or tissue sample after BOP takes it may offend Kaemmerling's religious beliefs, they cannot be said to hamper his religious exercise."
The decision was made by Judges David B. Sentelle, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Karen Lecraft Henderson.
This is another blow against prisoner attempts to stop DNA collection. The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled last year that collection of DNA samples from prisoners does not violate their privacy rights.
Thursday, December 4. 2008
Court Condemns Britain's 'Orwellian' DNA Database
One million innocent people could have their profiles wiped from Britain's 'Orwellian' DNA database after court ruling
By Ian Drury
Daily Mail | Nearly one million innocent people could have their profiles wiped off Britain's 'Orwellian' DNA database.
A landmark European ruling said it was unlawful for police to store for life swabs and fingerprints from people arrested, but later cleared of wrongdoing.
The national DNA database was thrown into turmoil after a court severely criticised the policy of holding samples of people absolved of any crime.
The damning verdict by the European Court of Human Rights could force the Government to wipe the DNA details of almost 860,000 people from the sprawling database.
In an excoriating attack on the system, 17 senior judges ruled unanimously that retaining the information of law-abiding citizens 'could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society'.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she was 'disappointed' by the verdict, which it is claimed could have far-reaching consequences for the police's ability to fight crime.
But civil rights campaigners said the ruling was a 'triumph for justice' over the hugely controversial 'Big Brother' policy.
Some anti-surveillance society campaigners went as far saying it 'called into question the legality' of other Government databases, including the national ID register, children's databases, police profiling techniques and even TV licensing information.
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