Assembly Minority Leader Heidi Gansert (R-Reno) recently introduced a feel-good bill (AB 234) which would mandate DNA testing for anyone arrested – not convicted, mind you; arrested – on suspicion of a felony.
Not only does this proposal have serious civil rights problems – at least until we totally eliminate this “innocent until proven guilty” thing – but at the time the bill was drafted Mrs. Gansert didn’t have a plan for how to pay the estimated additional $6 million it would cost taxpayers to enact this plan. More on that later.
But even leaving the constitutional and money concerns aside, it turns out that such massive DNA testing might not even work. That’s not my opinion; that’s the opinion of someone who actually knows what the hell he’s talking about. Let me first lay out this Nevadan’s bona fides as published by Wikipedia:
“Durk Pearson was born in 1943 and grew up on a farm in Illinois. He was reading by the age of four, and decided to become a scientist at that early age.
“While a student at MIT, he was a member of the MIT Science Fiction Society and one of the writers for the early underground comic God Comics. He took a triple major at MIT in physics, biology, and psychology, with a triple minor in electrical engineering, computer science, and chemistry, graduating with a B.S. in physics in 1965. His score on the Graduate Record Exam was the highest in the nation for that year.
“Durk has patents in the area of oil shale and tar sands recovery, lasers, holography, supplement formulations. He worked on all of the manned aerospace programs from Project Gemini to the Space Shuttle and won numerous awards, including an award from the International Society for Testing and Failure Analysis for his penetrating quality control and safety analysis. He wrote much of the safety manual for the Materials and Processing Laboratory on the Shuttle.”
So Mr. Pearson is no Jeff Spicoli…or even Sean Penn for that matter. And it would behoove Leader Gansert and the rest of the Legislature to carefully consider his words on this DNA testing bill as outlined in an email he sent to me this week:
“Dear Chuck. Thanks for your fine newsletter and your consistent fight against higher taxes.
“I want to warn you about a terrible unintended consequence of testing the DNA of everyone accused of a felony. The obvious problem of the $6+ megabuck cost is just the tip of the iceberg. The greater part of the iceberg is hidden from view in the complexities of statistics.
“If a woman says that I am the father of her child, a DNA test can determine with very high accuracy whether that is the case. Note that the DNA from one person, the child, is being compared to the DNA of one other person, the purported father.
“The situation is radically different when the DNA from tens of thousands of crime scenes is being compared against a database of the DNA of tens of thousands (or many millions at the national level) of felony arrestees. The difference is the statistical risk of a false positive.
“In the one-on-one paternity case, the risk of a false positive is vanishingly low. But the risk of false positives becomes nearly 100% when tens of thousands of samples are compared against millions of samples – hundreds of billions of fishing expedition comparisons, not one attempt at a match.
“If the risk of a laboratory mistake causing a false positive is 1 in 100,000, that risk is acceptable in a paternity case. It is acceptable where the DNA of one particular suspect is compared to the DNA left at one particular crime scene. It is NOT acceptable when there are billions of promiscuous fishing attempt matches being made between large DNA databases. Many innocent people will be arrested and almost certainly convicted for felonies that they did not commit.
“Please contact the Nobel Prize winning biologist whose work made these DNA tests possible. He created the Innocence Project where one on one DNA comparisons have freed over 200 wrongly convicted people.
“The proposal to take DNA samples from all persons arrested for felonies is a horror show of false convictions waiting to happen.
“One final note: When a prosecuting attorney says that the odds are a million to one that the DNA match proves guilt, he is either grossly ignorant or lying. Those huge odds do not consider the error rate (such as mixing up samples and cross-contamination) of the testing laboratory which is never as good as one error per 100,000 samples. This means a nightmare of false positive matches when every felony arrestee’s DNA is matched against every crime scene DNA.”
It will take a lot of political courage to oppose this emotion-ladened bill. We all want to stop and catch bad guys who do bad things. But in our haste to “do something,” we must always take care not to make a bad situation worse. After all, as the saying goes, “It’s better for 10 guilty men to go free than to imprison 1 innocent man.”
Now, back to the $6+ million funding question.
You’ll recall that Minority Leader Gansert sold out the Republican Party and its electoral chances at the ballot box in 2010 by not only voting for the teachers union’s massive new room tax hike a couple weeks back, but openly advocating for it on the floor of the Assembly during the debate. One couldn’t help but wonder where her thirty pieces of silver were going to come from for this sell-out on the tax issue. Well, now it appears we know.
Buried in the fine print of that proposed new massive tax hike on alcohol (AB 277) just introduced by Republican Assemblyman John Carpenter & the Democrats is a provision for using a portion of the proceeds from that tax hike to pay for Gansert’s new DNA testing proposal.
Makes you wanna hurl, doesn’t it?
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2 words:
Fourth Amendment
Finger prints and DNA are NOT equals. DNA sequencing is a far more complicated science because some 99.9% of all humans share the same DNA sequencing events. The science of DNA sequencing is relatively new, while the science of finger printing is well established. Over the last few years and after a great deal of trial and error, some DNA statistical matching techniques have been disqualified for being far less accurate than they were first reported to have been.
Finger prints and DNA are NOT equals. DNA sequencing is a far more complicated science because some 99.9% of all humans share the same DNA sequencing events. It is one thing to compare one DNA to only one other DNA sample. It is something else to see if one DNA sample match’s a subgroup out of ten’s of thousands or millions. When you compare one against many you collect a pool of possible answers, NOT one or two. You have a pooling effect of potential defendants. Will each member of this DNA defendants pool be asked the same set of questions??? Did you kill Colonel Mustard, in the library, with a Candlestick, on the night of March 15th this past year???
For example, I was adopted at birth. My mother and father both adopted me. Therefore, I am not directly biologically related to either my mother or father because of my adoption.
And yet, I can prove that I have thousands of biological relatives with exact match’s at 12, and then fewer at 25, and fewer still at 37, etc., at 67, and etc., at 111 different genetic markers from all around the world. This is because I volunteered and paid to participate in The Genographic Project by the National Geographic Society. The basic test is $15 or you can go all the way up to $289 for a whole set genetic markers.
FYI – The Genographic Project is a real time effort to map how humankind populated the earth. It is a five-year research partnership between National Geographic and IBM with support from the Waitt Family Foundation, and public participation through Family Tree DNA.
Now, begin to factor in the long list of potential civil right(s) violations “if” DNA sampling is mandatory for each arrest. Do I or you have the right to keep my DNA information private??? And factor in the costs of a defense that will take advantage of its rights to the full range of 6th Amendment protections. Such as to have face to face cross examination of each and every person who ever had any possible contact with each and every DNA sample and that person will have to describe the exact techniques that were used to extract any and all possible data groups from each DNA sample.
Did you know that 70% of those incarcerated in the United States today are non-white (see -Wikipedia, Incarceration in the United States – FN 13). On top of that 70%, add the extra risk(s), costs of a false-positive conviction for poor, non-white citizens. The legislature is potentially opening the flood gates to Section 1983 lawsuits and the raw, bare, and indefensible charges of institutional racism done under color of state law. DNA mandatory sampling, at the time of arrest is a bad idea.
Did you know that not even identical twins have exact matching fingerprints. But identical twins do have identical DNA matching data events.
“The DNA profiling technique was first reported in 1984 by Sir Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester in England… [and] was made commercially available in 1987…” – from Wikipedia
We are “CITIZENS” in the USA, not “Subjects” as they are in Great Britain under the English Common Law. We have a written Constitution, those in Great Britain do not. We are the sovereign people in the USA, in Great Britain they are but mere subjects whose rights, privileges, and immunity’s can change with a simple majority vote of Parliament.
“The Modern Era of Fingerprints: Jan Evangelista Purkyně or Purkinje (1787–1869), a Czech physiologist and professor of anatomy at the University of Breslau, published a thesis in 1823 discussing 9 fingerprint patterns, but he did not mention any possibility of using fingerprints to identify people. Some years later, the German anatomist Georg von Meissner (1829–1905) studied friction ridges, and five years after this, in 1858, Sir William James Herschel initiated fingerprinting in India. In 1877 at Hooghly (near Calcutta) he instituted the use of fingerprints on contracts and deeds to prevent the then-rampant repudiation of signatures and he registered government pensioners’ fingerprints to prevent the collection of money by relatives after a pensioner’s death. Herschel also fingerprinted prisoners upon sentencing to prevent various frauds that were attempted in order to avoid serving a prison sentence.
In 1880, Dr Henry Faulds, a surgeon in a Tokyo hospital, published his first paper on the subject in the scientific journal Nature, discussing the usefulness of fingerprints for identification and proposing a method to record them with printing ink. He also established their first classification and was also the first to identify fingerprints left on a vial. Returning to the UK in 1886, he offered the concept to the Metropolitan Police in London but it was dismissed at that time. Faulds wrote to Charles Darwin with a description of his method but, too old and ill to work on it, Darwin gave the information to his cousin, Francis Galton, who was interested in anthropology. Galton, by 1892 Sir Francis Galton, having been thus inspired to study fingerprints for ten years, published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification and encouraged its use in forensic science in his book Finger Prints. He had calculated that the chance of a “false positive” (two different individuals having the same fingerprints) was about 1 in 64 billion.” – from Wikipedia