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Dutch Cold Case Murder Solved After 8000 People Gave Their DNA
sciencewatcher writes "A 1999 cold case rape and murder in The Netherlands has been solved. Dutch police asked 8000+ men living within 5 kilometers of the crime scene to volunteer their DNA so that the murderer could be traced through (close or distant) family members sharing part of this DNA. As it turned out, the man now in custody turned in his own DNA, resulting in a 100% match. The request of the police was discussed here on Slashdot in September. The percentage of people participating was closing in on 90%; in the midsize town of the victim it was 96%."
It is interesting to see the different attitudes toward volunteering information to the government. If NYC asked something like this, it would be an outrage and participation would be roughly 1% if it moved forward at all.
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I don't like the idea of DNA dragnets.
Just because I'm a male within 5km of a rape does not mean I should be required to give up my DNA.
First, who owns it? Does it get destroyed? Do I trust government to do that competently? No: it will be sold to the highest bidder.
Second, am I coerced into doing this? Will they shame me publicly for not giving up my DNA?
Finally, who else knows about it? Is my health insurance going up because they've found I'm susceptible to lung cancer or AIDS? What if there's a way to tell if I'm gay or prone to alcoholism (hic)?
There's got to be a better way to solve these rapes than asking all of us to give up private information at the threat of arrest.
Everybody in the Dutch talks as if the man is convicted already. He's not. The case is not solved until a judge has had the last word, and given the inaccuracies in DNA matching I'm very interested in what a judge has to say about this.
Assuming the person arrested is not guilty, it could just be a false positive match. DNA tests are not 100% precise, in fact I read they are 99.7% precise only, resulting in approximately 1-in-300 errors, so in any wide-ranging tests with thousands of different DNAs all coming from the same area (meaning most of them had a lot of common ancestors across them) it was almost bound to happen. Imagine the uproar if TWO 100% matches had been found (and I do not mean homozygote twins) !
Note that roughly 1 in 10-15 person has more than one set of DNA, through chimerism - rare - or plain mosaicism - which is much more common than usually thought: that's part of how you can get "surprising" results of >10% paternity tests turning out negative in countries where those tests are sold over the counter. There are documented cases of botched criminal cases due to this, the most famous being Linda "I'm my own twin" Fairchild's.
And if he IS guilty then it may be one way to work up doubt into a future jury, using precisely those arguments. So, it's not necessarily idiotic.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The DNA matched DNA found on a cigarette lighter found in her schoolbag - not DNA from the rape itself apparently. It's possible in my mind that the guy is innocent of rape\murder and guilty of selling a schoolgirl a lighter or her guilty of stealing it. More details need to come out, this isn't "solved" in my mind unless they have DNA evidence from the rape itself that matches.
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If 96% of people had done it the social pressure might have been insurmountable. He might have figured if he was the only person in the village who didn't give DNA the police would investigate him and find him anyway, so he might as well give the DNA, hope that there would be a mistake, or hope that he could claim "If it was me, then why did I give them my DNA?"
That's why the US has the fifth amendment (and why a right against self-incrimination is a good idea in general). Not turning in DNA is not probable cause for an investigation, and if that is why they started investigating him, the case would have a high chance of being thrown out (of course, the family DNA might be enough to establish an investigation). I'm not sure what the law is on this in the Netherlands.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
That's a VERY important point in this case. People hear "DNA" these days and automatically think "irrefutable evidence." But in this case, it's just further evidence--NOT ironclad proof of guilt.
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I haven't RTFA, but from the summary, this sounds like a textbook example of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor's_fallacy, which is a special case of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
If you have a suspect in hand, then DNA evidence can be pretty compelling. But when you comb through the population trying to find a suspect using DNA evidence, then you're walking straight into a miscarriage of justice.
If government is involved, there is no "volunteering". The threat of physical force is ALWAYS present with government, no matter how far under the carpet they sweep it, or how much smokescreen they blow in front of it.
What if it's a false positive?
Given that the chance of a false positive is normally between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000 in DNA tests (this is based on cases where people have actually tested labs by sending them known matching and non matching samples - not the statistics of DNA) and they have carried out 8000 tests, that's pretty likely. Most likely they had multiple false positives, but he's the one which repeated when they retested. If he was actually guilty he probably wouldn't hand his sample in.
The most likely explanation, given that he's a farmer, is that his DNA was present on some food the lab technician put next to the original sample. Now there's no way he can prove his innocence (were were you on the 1st of May 1999? can you prove that?). He's fucked. Serves him right for trusting the police.
Let's see if the Dutch police actually investigate or if they just assume his guilt. From what I've seen whilst probably honest they're pretty narrow minded.
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