Slashdot Mirror

Think about this factor: if they keep record of the DNA and fingerprints of almost everyone, the usefulness will go down... If everyone is registered theoretically you would have no crime, since the detection should be 100%. But we all know that won't happen, crime will continue and smart people will find new ways to circumvent the fingerprint or DNA detection... I even read an article recently that DNA can be faked now (the tested markers), so you can impersonate any unlucky fuck. If you can prove that dozens of entities (including the government, hospital, insurance company and Disney) had (and probably have) access to this data, it can't be guaranteed that DNA or a fingerprint identifies you 100% anymore.

I have no problem with my fingerprint being registered somewhere for access purposes, it's useful. But since fingerprints can be faked even a fingerprint scan of me entering the secure area does not prove it was me entering...
The simple fact is that the more people are registered the less reliable the detection rate will be!

The biggest problem is: the courts will probably blindly convict people on the basis of fingerprints and DNA even years after widespread abuse becomes commonplace... a lot of people will go to jail innocently before they will realize relying on these detection methods for 100% is deeply flawed. And guess what; the battle against this stupidity has already started: http://www.innocenceproject.org/

Ahhh finally the whole meat of the bleeding heart argument. How about I take the opposite position? Let's turn loose every single murderer in prison because one of them might be innocent.

Consider this: you are driving, and summoned to stop. It just so happens to be that the cops are corrupt and have to make their monthly quota. One of 'm plants a baggie in your vehicle, and you go off to the Tent Camp. It doesn't even have to be about corrupt cops if you think this is implausible.

Honestly, I would take my chances with a "less than perfect" justice system that offers greater deterrence

Here's the trick though: death penalty doesn't offer greater deterrence per se.

And, as Terry Pratchett once said, the death penalty combines the maximum deterrence with the minimum chance of recurrence.

Terry Pratchett writes satire. Errors (which are made a-plenty) can never, ever be righted again. But do continue your belief in your own infallibility and the absolute correctness of the justice system, because these are all disgusting liberal bleeding hearted links, and I'm obviously very much misguided, being a subject in the People's Republic of Europe.

I'm sure everything would've been right if they just would've manned up.

You're comparing the inquisition to the modern justice system? Have you been smoking crack?

When it comes to the War on Drugs, it is an inquisition.

Point is: There is no such thing as freedom or fair law

Well if you're defining your concept of fairness from the point-of-view of the criminal, then yea, no law can ever be fair.

Yea, tell all those who were in prison years who the Innocence Project were finally able to clear that the justice system is fair. Tell Steven Barnes, who was convicted of rape, sodomy, and murder in 1989 and cleared in 2009. Or Orlando Boquete who was convicted of attempted sexual battery and burglary in 1983. On 23 May 2006 DNA testing proved he was innocent yet he wasn't released until 22 August 2006. Tell him the justice system is fair.

Is the rest of that a straw man, used to deflect people from the issues?

Falcon

You're comparing the inquisition to the modern justice system? Have you been smoking crack?

When it comes to the War on Drugs, it is an inquisition.

Point is: There is no such thing as freedom or fair law

Well if you're defining your concept of fairness from the point-of-view of the criminal, then yea, no law can ever be fair.

Yea, tell all those who were in prison years who the Innocence Project were finally able to clear that the justice system is fair. Tell Steven Barnes, who was convicted of rape, sodomy, and murder in 1989 and cleared in 2009. Or Orlando Boquete who was convicted of attempted sexual battery and burglary in 1983. On 23 May 2006 DNA testing proved he was innocent yet he wasn't released until 22 August 2006. Tell him the justice system is fair.

Is the rest of that a straw man, used to deflect people from the issues?

Falcon

You're comparing the inquisition to the modern justice system? Have you been smoking crack?

When it comes to the War on Drugs, it is an inquisition.

Point is: There is no such thing as freedom or fair law

Well if you're defining your concept of fairness from the point-of-view of the criminal, then yea, no law can ever be fair.

Yea, tell all those who were in prison years who the Innocence Project were finally able to clear that the justice system is fair. Tell Steven Barnes, who was convicted of rape, sodomy, and murder in 1989 and cleared in 2009. Or Orlando Boquete who was convicted of attempted sexual battery and burglary in 1983. On 23 May 2006 DNA testing proved he was innocent yet he wasn't released until 22 August 2006. Tell him the justice system is fair.

Is the rest of that a straw man, used to deflect people from the issues?

Falcon

You see, it's all well and good to want mistakes to be quick and easy to resolve. Some of them are. Some of them aren't. The ones that aren't, aren't for a reason. It sucks that it was inconvenient for you, but IMO that's better than the alternative.

Would you feel the same after you've spent 23 years in prison for a rape you did not commit? I doubt it, by the end of those years I'd bet you'd agree with those who believe it was better to let 10 guilty go free than falsely convict one innocent. And you wouldn't be able to agree or disagree once you were executed then cleared.

Neither of those cases is a matter of inconvenience either.

Falcon

We send people to death row on little more than unreliable eye witness testimony

We do?

The US does. The Innocence Project has proven the innocence or had arranged the pardon of 4 people this past week. Ernest Sonnier had been in prison 23 years for rape when a DNA test cleared him. A report on the lab that originally ran tests that was used to convict him "details dozens of testing errors and questionable practices uncovered at the Houston lab." I don't recall if it was Alabama or Louisiana but one of them had a problem with an investigator, he had been caught manufacturing evidence. In one case though though he had been caught the state supreme court has upheld the conviction on another person on deathrow ruling to the effect than just because he manufactured evidence once it doesn't mean he did in all cases. Yet they wouldn't allow new tests.

Falcon

We send people to death row on little more than unreliable eye witness testimony

We do?

The US does. The Innocence Project has proven the innocence or had arranged the pardon of 4 people this past week. Ernest Sonnier had been in prison 23 years for rape when a DNA test cleared him. A report on the lab that originally ran tests that was used to convict him "details dozens of testing errors and questionable practices uncovered at the Houston lab." I don't recall if it was Alabama or Louisiana but one of them had a problem with an investigator, he had been caught manufacturing evidence. In one case though though he had been caught the state supreme court has upheld the conviction on another person on deathrow ruling to the effect than just because he manufactured evidence once it doesn't mean he did in all cases. Yet they wouldn't allow new tests.

Falcon

We send people to death row on little more than unreliable eye witness testimony

We do?

The US does. The Innocence Project has proven the innocence or had arranged the pardon of 4 people this past week. Ernest Sonnier had been in prison 23 years for rape when a DNA test cleared him. A report on the lab that originally ran tests that was used to convict him "details dozens of testing errors and questionable practices uncovered at the Houston lab." I don't recall if it was Alabama or Louisiana but one of them had a problem with an investigator, he had been caught manufacturing evidence. In one case though though he had been caught the state supreme court has upheld the conviction on another person on deathrow ruling to the effect than just because he manufactured evidence once it doesn't mean he did in all cases. Yet they wouldn't allow new tests.

Falcon

The more comprehensive the database the more innocents will be prevented from becoming victims.

Or the more innocents will become victims of invalid DNA tests.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/268.php

I bet you're the type who just sucks it all right up when the prosecutors' expert witnesses tells you just how tiny the chances are that the DNA test might be wrong.

I find it interesting that you would give them the benefit of the doubt, when you doubt that they extended the same courtesy.

Innocent until proven guilty isn't a "courtesy" to murderers, it's a fundamental principle of law designed to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. That is, it's there to protect you and me.

As the large numbers of wrongful convictions for murder show, the principle is not being applied enough:

http://www.innocenceproject.org/

See Cynthia Sommers

See The Innocence Project.

I have no doubt a sizable portion of the convicted are innocent. Sadly, many crimes don't lend themselves to exoneration via DNA evidence. Juries are very good about convicting based on their prejudices. If you're arrested and are eccentric -- you're toast.

There are policing agencies out there who already do similar things. Despite it's absense, they may explain that there's incontrevertible evidence that shows that the suspect is guitly, they just want a confession so that the trial goes faster and with less fuss/humiliation for others/etc...

Turns out that one can get a fairly large number of confessions that way, much like you apparently desire. The problem is, it's not all THAT uncommon for the confessions to be lies. Innocent people will lie and confess to horrible, horrible crimes. And a confession given to a jury is a really really good predictor of them finding the defendent guitly. Even if there's little to no other evidence. People tend to believe confessions, which is sort of confusing since they have to reconcile the idea that "this is a dangerous lunatic with no morals and a willingness to kill" against "this is an honest man, who will condemn himself to jail by giving a confession". Still, they manage it.

Feel free to read a bit more about the subject of false confessions here, on some webnotes for a college class here or even here(this last one is perhaps more likely to cherrypick it's evidence, but what it says appears to be true).

False confessions are a rather worrying thing to me, as once a person confesses, the police have a tendency to cease looking for other potential guilty parties. While it's possible some other person will eventually be found guilty and you get released, it's not really something that The System tries for. Makes 'em look bad if they accidentally put someone in jail and gave 'em a whole bunch of publicity as a convicted rapist.

"The question they ask of the guy in the dock is, what is the probability that an innocent man would match this DNA? And the answer is, of course, about one in a million," says Pike, looking around the table and pausing for drama. "The question they should ask is, given the match, what is the probability that he is innocent? And the answer is, about one-third."

I just found this article at http://www.innocenceproject.org/dnanews/index.php.
The Innocence Project usually uses DNA to prove someone is innocent. Here is an example where an innocent man was convicted because of DNA:

Compiled by Peter J. McQuillan

Forensic Contretemps

Brian Kelly was the first person in Scotland to be successfully prosecuted solely on the basis of DNA evidence. The facts were uncomplicated: A woman was raped at night in her Ayrshire home in 1987 by a burglar. In July of that year Kelly, a police officer who lived nearby, voluntarily gave a DNA sample to investigators believing this would eliminate him from the inquiry. Thereafter, the lab reported a match and Kelly was charged with the rape. The victim was unable to identify him as the rapist even though she knew him as a police officer. Kelly nonetheless was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to prison for six years. His parole was delayed until 1993 because he refused to admit his guilt. The Scotsman (Nov 23, 2003) recently disclosed that the conviction may be quashed early this year because two separate studies have concluded that cross contamination of the evidence may have produced a false-positive result. The Texas Department of Public Safety operates 13 regional crime labs, all of which are nationally accredited. A review by the Houston Chronicle (Oct 26, 2003) of recent audits of seven of these labs found that one failed to adequately decontaminate lab space. Another had improper evidence storage and lacked a back-up power supply. "When power fluctuates during amplification of extracted DNA, the evidence could be destroyed." An inspector noted that dozens of evidence cuttings at one DNA lab were not properly stored. A DPS scientist explained away the deficiencies by saying that a 100 percent compliance rate is an unreasonable expectation. "You can go into any lab, any day of the week and find some things that need correction." Last year, according to the Bucks County Courier Times (Oct 14, 2003), errors were uncovered in four cases worked by one scientist at the Pennsylvania State Police Crime Lab. In one case she failed to detect a semen stain on an article of clothing assigned to her for analysis. Last June she was given six months of remedial training, at the end of which she resigned. PSP officials sent letters to prosecutors in 27 counties whose cases were handled by her, notifying them of the potential for error. Some 615 cases were scheduled for retesting. In the neighboring state of New Jersey, five police officers were recently convicted in federal court for a civil rights violation involving the death of a prisoner in their custody. Introduced at trial was a bloodstained concrete chip that was pried from a sidewalk two weeks after the victim was arrested. Witnesses said the five officers beat the victim at that location. A FBI Crime Lab scientist testified that she matched his blood to the sidewalk stain. The defendants were awaiting sentences when FBI officials disclosed that the scientist had just admitted skipping a quality control step in DNA tests in their case and 102 others. She did not perform the routine check for contamination because she wanted her casework "to run smoothly." The prosecuto

Even that won't help always. Better hope these guys get hold of your case then. And make sure they make DNA testing - approximately 25 percent of post-conviction DNA tests done by the FBI do not produce a match.

• 
  And finally, what's so wrong about "revenge" anyway?

What if you are guilty? That's why there are trials and juries and all that.

To see such optimism really warms my old heart... can I quote that above to these guys?

If you don't like the way the law and courts work, I would agree. It doesn't mean that what the RIAA is doing is wrong.

Don't you think that being sued in a civil court and running up thousands of dollars in legal fees is a threat? One that the RIAA/MPAA uses all the time. And even if you are innocent, stand your ground and defend yourself, the penalties that could be applied if you are wrongly convicted (see above) will ruin your life.

Copyright law needs to exist to protect the rights of the artists that produce the content , not the industry that doesn't compensate them and screws consumers, then blatantly thumbs their nose at the court ordered fix.

When the RIAA starts doing the right thing, then I'll start supporting their actions against those that infringe. Until then, this looks too much like a big criminal shaking down a smaller one.

DNA sequencing is usually done on sequence fragments and not the entire genome.

In fact, most forensic DNA work was originally done using RFLP mapping, which doesn't involve sequencing anything at all. Sequencing is relatively recent. Most (all?) of the databases are still based on RFLP.

Therefore it's not as unique as one might be led to believe.

If you bothered to read the literature, you'd find that there's been a great deal of study of exactly how reliable it is in various circumstances. Also, if you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that there's no a priori reason to care about what percentage of the genome is examined; the question is how much variability there is in the part that is examined. Additional variability in the unexamined parts has nothing to do with the reliability of the test.

Most criminologists (with a moral conscience) know this and many feel that this a useful tool to rule someone out, but it is not reliable enough to single someone out. Take the case of identical twins: identical genomes; you would have to rely on fingerprints.

A criminologist is a social scientist who deals with the motivations and social contexts of crimes. You are thinking of "criminalists", or "forensic DNA examiners", who are the people who do crime lab work.

I know a lot of these people personally; it so happens that one of my parents was involved in the development of forensic DNA from the beginning. Some of the people I know are involved with things like the Innocence Project. Some of them are private practitioners who typically testify for the defense; if those people have a bias, it's toward clearing people, not toward nailing the innocent.

I have never heard any of them say that they would never use DNA evidence to uniquely identify somebody. Not once.

I have heard many of them say, loudly and repeatedly, that there are circumstances under which they wouldn't use DNA to "finger" anybody, including, but probably not limited to, cases where there's a possibility that a close relative of the suspect was involved, cases where samples were degraded or contaminated. I've never heard them say that they'd never do it. I have heard them say, rather vehemently, that DNA is a lot more reliable than the old serological tests that put a lot of people into prison in the 1970s and 1980s.

Of course, DNA is also more reliable than eyewitnesses, but then almost anything is more reliable than an eyewitness.

No, you can't apply DNA, or any other technique, mechanically, but to say that it's intrinsically unusable is just silly. It's about the most reliable thing out there.

And since fingerprints can distinguish beteen identical twins, it should be obvious even to the casual observer that physical uniqueness is determined by more than the entire DNA sequence. Moreover, we already have fingerprinting, so what's the need for DNA?

Think about how you're using it.

1. Criminals don't leave fingerprint cards at crime scenes; in fact, they seem oddly reluctant to leave anything at all if they can avoid it. You may have hair, or a blood spatter, or semen, or saliva, and no fingerprint, or no decent fingerprint. You want to find out if the person who committed this crime is in your database or not; you can't query on a fingerprint, because you don't have one. DNA is another completely independent way for you to find a suspect.
2. I don't know if it's still true, but coding fingerprints for database lookups used to be a time-consuming, error-prone manual process. Don't be misled by the biometric authentication systems you see on computers. First of all, those systems don't work as well as advertised. Secondly, they're usually trying to confirm an identity, not find one in a mass of candidat

As to going from human to machine memory: I don't know that the number of faulty arrests will drop, either as an absolute or relative number. For example, if we relied on machines, not traffic officers, for speeding violations both the absolute and relative number of speeders would go up in the machine world. Of course bad work by humans is terrible. But I'm thinking that faster, automated and weakly controlled (at least as Ashcroft wants it) work by machines isn't better. As its late I'll just quote:

"But there also will be tangible, specific harm.

The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.

Several years ago, after the existence of Human Resources Development Canada's "Longitudinal Labour Force File" was brought to light by my predecessor, many people demanded to see the information that had been held about them. They were astonished by the number of factual errors. That was only a research database, so its inaccuracies probably would have remained relatively benign even if it had not been dismantled.

But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.

If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm...

Those purposes, by the Government's own account, include everything from routine income tax investigations to trying to flag Canadians as potential pedophiles or money launderers solely on the basis of their travel patterns.

This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society...

And as I noted upstream, the rate of conviction of innocents in the US - even in capital cases, where the standard of confidence of guilt should be very strong - is disturbingly high. I'm a civil libertarian to the nth degree, but insofar as video surveillence in public space is not the same thing as the assumption of guilt (any more than a cop walking the beat is) I'm all for cctv surveillence. Yes, even if it means that Office O'Malley gets a shot of me adjusting the family jewels.

I think the general public knows about prison rape but just does not care.

You will care if some overzealous DA will accuse you for someone else's crime and doctor the evidence to ensure his promotion after another "solved case". So far 138 prisoners were released when DNA tests proved they biologically could not make the crimes they were sentenced for. Many of them regained freedom after over ten years in prison and will receive no compensation whatsoever. And these 138 are actually a lucky minority of all the innocent convicts in the USA.

I think the general public knows about prison rape but just does not care.

You will care if some overzealous DA will accuse you for someone else's crime and doctor the evidence to ensure his promotion after another "solved case". So far 138 prisoners were released when DNA tests proved they biologically could not make the crimes they were sentenced for. Many of them regained freedom after over ten years in prison and will receive no compensation whatsoever. And these 138 are actually a lucky minority of all the innocent convicts in the USA.

There's an organizitaion called the The Innocence Project headed by Barry Scheck which prides itself on freeing prisoners who didn't have the technology of DNA testing avaible to them during their trials.

In light of this article, I wonder how many guilty people have been set free. I'm sure there are guilty parties that proclaim their innocence and see no harm or foul in having the DNA testing done by said non profit organization, in hopes of some fluke in their favor.

An excellent source on the prevelance of false convictions can be found at www.innocenceproject.org.

However this page shows that faulty DNA evidence is positively rare as a factor in false convictions, at least so far.

But if you really have doubts about the ability of police to convict innocent poor people then you haven't been following the news. Illinois had a stretch where more people on Death Row were exonerated than were actually executed. By anyone's definition that is a very troublesome error rate.

An excellent source on the prevelance of false convictions can be found at www.innocenceproject.org.

However this page shows that faulty DNA evidence is positively rare as a factor in false convictions, at least so far.

But if you really have doubts about the ability of police to convict innocent poor people then you haven't been following the news. Illinois had a stretch where more people on Death Row were exonerated than were actually executed. By anyone's definition that is a very troublesome error rate.

What this basically suggests is that the United States is not the bastion of freedom that is often held up to the world. If you piss off a policeman, he can drop a baggy in your car and say "Oh look, what's this?" and bust you for drug possession even if you've never done anything stronger than aspirin. The only difference between the United States and, say, Mexico, is that our cops generally do believe they work for the people rather than for, say, drug traffickers, so they tend to use their mojo on scumbags who, in their opinion, need to be in jail. But that doesn't make the system any fairer if a cop just doesn't like the way you look (e.g., you're a black man driving alone in a ritzy white neighborhood and thus guilty of driving while black) and concocts some lie to justify stopping you ("he was weaving in and out of traffic and slowing suspiciously in front of houses as if scoping them out for a robbery").

What this basically suggests is that the United States is not the bastion of freedom that is often held up to the world. If you piss off a policeman, he can drop a baggy in your car and say "Oh look, what's this?" and bust you for drug possession even if you've never done anything stronger than aspirin. The only difference between the United States and, say, Mexico, is that our cops generally do believe they work for the people rather than for, say, drug traffickers, so they tend to use their mojo on scumbags who, in their opinion, need to be in jail. But that doesn't make the system any fairer if a cop just doesn't like the way you look (e.g., you're a black man driving alone in a ritzy white neighborhood and thus guilty of driving while black) and concocts some lie to justify stopping you ("he was weaving in and out of traffic and slowing suspiciously in front of houses as if scoping them out for a robbery").