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Military DNA Registry Used in Criminal Case
bubblegoose writes "The Reading Eagle has a story about a man sought in a Reading, PA. murder who was arrested Thursday in Puerto Rico. This is the first time anyone has been apprehended in a criminal case based on DNA collected by the military. Apparently the DNA registry has a stringent set of rules that must be met for a blood sample to be released and those were satisfied." The DNA registry catalogs DNA samples from all US armed forces, ostensibly for identifying remains (although if that were the only reason, the samples would be automatically destroyed at the end of the servicemember's contract.)
I don't see this as a big deal. I spent 20 years in the US Navy, and would assume my fingerprints and photo were available forever to anyone with the right access. The DNA does not seem like an escalation. I wouldn't want any of it to be public or EASY to get to mind you...
No pain, no gain: So if I keep automating with NT shell scripts, I should be a bizzlionare in no time!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Sure it does. Your medical records (ALL OF THEM) are kept for 50 years and the DNA is no different. After 50 years it is destroyed.
If people want their destroyed sooner, they can write to
Armed Forces Repository of Specimen Samples for the Identification of Remains
16050 Industrial Drive, Suite 100
Gaithersburg, MD 20877.
And request that it be done.
And for you conspiracy theorists.... pull you head out of the sand on this one.... the military told soldiers about this when they started doing it. I was a medic in the Army when this began and all of your questions were brought up back then as well.
It is funny how you were all smoking pot in college on momma's dollar while some of us had to actually go out and EARN our right to go to college.
although if that were the only reason, the samples would be automatically destroyed at the end of the servicemember's contract.
If michael had bothered to read the second link, he would have seen this:
Once you complete your full service obligation, you also can request destruction of your DNA record.
Complete with where you can get the form and instructions. If he's in the military, then he's farked. If he was out of th emilitary though, it's his own damn problem.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
not only that, but DNA has also exonerated many over the years. this week I saw something on Discovery Channel where a guy was locked up for 16 years for raping and nearly killing his wife. (the crime happened in the late 70's, long before DNA testing) He got jailed on his wife's testimony that he was the one who attacked him.
He got offered parole many times, but refused their requirement of confessing the crime. (That's another major problem for another discussion - a real crook can confess and get paroled while an innocent who remains adamant stays locked up)
He eventually found a lawyer who got the DNA tested, and the match was indeed negative. The state ran the DNA through their DB of previously convicted sex offenders, and found their man. He was already serving time for a whole series of rapes/murders in the same jail.
The wife got confused because the room was dark when it happened, and the two men bore similar appearances under that kind of lighting.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
One thing they always seem to omit is that DNA testing is not 100% reliable. Not counting the possibility of errors in the testing lab, or decay or contamination of the sample, the results still narrow things down to one in x-million people (the value of x currently escapes me) under ideal conditions. While this may be sufficient for a paternity test, I'm not sure it's equally effective as stand-alone evidence for any arbitrary crime.
If you've been active duty and served out a stint in active duty you might be called up for duty in case of a national emergency, war, mobilization or if your MOS is needed for up to 10 years. It's called the inactive reserves.
So even if the service is going to delete the records after a person serves it might be a while till they really aren't part of the system.
for what they're worth:
This actually comes at a good time for me. I'm finishing up James Watson's book "DNA" which gives some length discussion to the idea of genetic fingerprinting, including it's moral and legal implications. You should pick it up if you're interested.
That aside, I think I agree with Watson's view that the benefits of DNA fingerprinting, for the most part, in both convicting the bad guy and freeing the innocent guy wrongly accused, greatly outnumbers the possibilities for abuse. And I'm normally someone that values civil rights and privacy pretty highly.
To make sure privacy and the DNA databases run parallel, there should be some rules. For example, most DNA identification that goes on comparing DNA at the crime site with the DNA in the database or from the suspect himself relies on comparing the "junk DNA" that has come to be from mutuations, which can, for the most part, narrow it down to an individual, or at least to a probability that it's him that would leave the exception negligible. Since we're concentrating on portions of DNA that really serve no purpose (that we can tell, at least), there shouldn't be any reason for a database to keep track of parts of my DNA that actually serve a function and may give details of my life like if I'm prone to getting a disease, if I'm lactose intolerant, etc. Involuntary collections should not include such information. Voluntary collections should give you the choice (the benefit being that if you're unconcious, your DNA database can tell a doctor what he or she should watch out for).
Furthermore, the use of DNA evidence should be restricted to certain kinds of crimes. Obviously, murder and rape should be good candidates for the technique to be used. However, crimes that, for example, have recently been defined (or redefined) by legislation, should be excluded. Like the fact that the Patriot Act, as it's written, can include something as harmless as protest under the category of "terrorism". Obviously, you should avoid collecting DNA databses here.
There have also been talks of keeping DNA evidence on people who have been detained but not charged, or who have been charged, but proven not guilty. This is ridiculous. If you're not a criminal, or you're not in the army, the only person who should be getting your DNA is your doctor. That's it.
Now comes DNA if it becomes easy to process and there are large databases avalible
I think there is a vast misunderstaning of how difficult it is to process DNA evidince (especially compared to fingerprints) and what these so-called "databases" are.
Starting with the database. Its a collection of blood samples (two drops of blood on a card). Just to process one sample to where it could be compared with another takes several days in a lab. Also, in order for these tests to have the necessary level of validity, they have to be run at the same time and in the same lab. You can't have two different labs running the different samples or even the same lab do it at different times. Compared to this, processing fingerprints in trivial.
So, going back to the article. The police had other reasons to suspect Casiano-Gernandez, so they requested the samples from the military registry in order to have a lab run the comparisons. Its not like you can just fire off a database search from a computer and wait for the result.
Just FYI, these so-called databases are simply two drops of dried blood on a card. There's nothing digitized (yet anyway).
Next point is that these blood tests do not rely on DNA sequences (not directly anyway) but essentially just looking at patterns created when slicing up the DNA with enzymes and looking for genetic markers.
For example, a commissioned officer literally serves "at the pleasure of the President".
Just because someone's ended their term of active duty service does not mean they've ended all obligations to the military. Get your facts straight before you start bashing those that sacrifice much so you can pontificate on the internet.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
I think you have a misunderstanding of DNA databases.
In the case of the military/criminal records the tissue is processed immediately because DNA is not reliably stable in tissue even at extremely low temperature for extensive periods of time (i.e. decades).
You CAN have different labs process different materials at different times because they use the same molecular biological techniques:
Restriction Fragment Lengthy Polymorphism (RFLP) is a type of analysis which "digests" DNA according to unique 5-7 basepair recongniation sequences. The location of these sequences are different in everbody so each person has a unique digestion profile which can be resolved and cataloged.
The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a technique which copies short, specific sequences of one's DNA over and over again. By PCR amplifying a number of unique loci along the genome and even sequencing for slight changes (SNPs, Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) it becomes possible to uniquely identify someone.
All of the results of these techniques can be entered into a computer and referenced (i.e. a database.) Furthermore, these are just some of the types of molecular biological analysis available for "DNA databases" which contain information, not so much biological tissue.
-DD
ps) I notice a lot of Bio misinformation on Slashdot. I am in the 4th year of a PhD in Molecular Biology so please have a good understanding of Biology (preferably masters level) before attempting to correct my statements.
This is a layman version of the real process; I worked on some software to work with this data, and read some science books until I understood this. However, I couldn't do it in a lab
There are 13 standard locations in the genome, called loci. Each is the starting point of a string of DNA that repeats in a known pattern,
but the number of repeats varies from person to person, and is inherited. So for each of the 13 loci, you come up with either one or two repeat counts, one from each parent (they could be the same number). If all of these 13 pairs of numbers
match, the samples came from the same person. If not, then they did not.
There is more to it, since the different counts are not equally likely, and the frequencies vary by race, gender, etc. So determining if two samples are from related people, and how closely
they're related, is more complex.
I hope that helps, and isn't too over-simplified.