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On the Dangers and Potential Abuses of DNA Familial Searching
Advocatus Diaboli sends a story of how a high tech forensic procedure almost led investigators to the wrong person. In 1996, a young woman named Angie Dodge was assaulted and murdered in Idaho Falls, Idaho. There was a conviction in the case, but later reports claimed the wrong man was in prison, and police thought there were more than one attacker anyway. This eventually led to the re-opening of the investigation. Using DNA evidence that had been preserved from the crime scene, police used a controversial technique called familial searching to try to find a lead. This method is used when there is no direct DNA match within the available databases. Instead, it tries to identify family members of the suspect. Police found a partial match, which eventually led them to Michael Usry, a New Orleans filmmaker. They convinced a judge to provide a search warrant to extract Usry's DNA and test it against the sample. It wasn't until a month after the extraction that they told him he'd been cleared.
but their algorithms are patented, and they use systemd.
assaulted and murdered? Isn't that a bit redundant? I mean, how do you murder someone without physically attacking them? durrrr
No mistake was made. The police checked a potential suspect and cleared him.
So, they got a warrant like they're supposed to.
Then they executed the warrant, gathered a DNA sample, and tested it.
Sample came back as not matching, so they removed the suspect from their list of suspects.
So, what's the problem here? They checked out a lead (using legal methods, like a warrant), found it went nowhere, and continued the investigation into other possible leads....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There are reasonable arguments against this sort of thing, but the fact that it led to an investigation of an individual who was subsequently cleared isn't one of them. If the police already knew who did it they wouldn't have to investigate anyone.
Odds are one of them is the culprit. Better safe than sorry!
They identified a suspect based on evidence and eliminated him using evidence.
How is that abuse?
Just because someones DNA was found at a crime scene doesn't mean they were there at the time of the crime or even that they were ever there. There have been enough cases forensics Labs accidentally contaminating evidence never mind the fact that even today DNA finger prints aren't that unique. Basically it should only ever be used as corroborating evidence.
Tell that to the parents of a serial killer's victims. I suspect having your child brutally murdered is a bigger inconvenience than what this guy went through.
So can someone explain to me why the FBI has carte blanche to run searches through the Ancestry.com database? It says they had a court order to reveal the name, but apparently no court order was necessary to do the check, why is that?
Which as much as an "art" as a tested science. In situtations of a partial fingerprint there are fewer characteristics to match a database. And they have been incorrect in the past as in the case of the Oregon lawyer mistaken for a Spanish terrorist. Although you may be given the broad odds of a mismatch, I wonder what if there have been actual studies. For example, randomly reduce fingerprint caharacteristics until there are multiple partial matches and see if any are correct.
The "(un)reasonable" standard is so vague, almost anything can be argued in and out of it.
The anonymous grandparent is right in that DNA-samples (and fingerprints) could be collected from everyone, and it would help police immensely.
The question then boils down to whether we want the police helped so much. More generally, do we want 100% of crimes to be reliably solvable, or would we rather some criminals remained able to escape today in exchange for it being possible (however remotely) for some future subversives to succeed against some hypothetically oppressive government, which would have already illegalized all ordinary methods of opposition?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Another? What was the second crime here? That the police investigated the first crime? There was no second crime.
I understand your argument that a database of DNA raises privacy concerns. It's something that has been discussed many times here already.
Did the police then remove the innocent citizen's DNA record from all databases it was entered into against said innocent citizen's will?
If not does:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
have any real value in protecting our personal liberty?
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
Atleast you won't go away for nothing.
Kill your enemies.
Even calling this circumstantial evidence was a massive stretch, they didn't have any evidence he knew the victim, had no evidence he had ever been to the state in over a decade, no history of violence. Just a probable familial match that turned out to be not so probable. A judge with any sense should have balked at the request, but unfortunately the days of judges who questioned prosecutors/police are long gone.
DNA fingerprinting isn't completely unique. Now when used the normal way, testing someone who has come under suspicions for other reasons, a match may be unlikely enough that it has evidential value. But when the you reverse the process ("get me anyone in the country who matches this DNA whether we have any reason to suspect them or not"), there's a good chance of going after an innocent party as that group is going to have a number of people in it, all but one of whom is innocent.
"but no police officer should ever be disappointed to find out a suspect is innocent"
I think you need a little dose of reality. The purpose of the police is to protect society, mostly from people who do illegal things but sometimes from unfortunate circumstances. In the case of people who do illegal things you want the police to identify and possibly apprehend the person as quickly and efficiently as possible so they can continue on with getting the next miscreant. While it is a relief that the wrong person was identified as a suspect and then exonerated it is also, at the same time, disapointing that the effort to do this was in effect spent on the wrong person and not spent on catching the real culprit. It is possible to be relieved and disappointed about the same event at the same time.
As an aside I don't really care how the police felt as long as they did the correct thing, investigating suspects, exonerating the innocent and catching the guilty.
It is more like searching an existing database, such as finger prints for close matches then proving the match with more up to date reference sample.
The inclusion of "papers" in the fourth amendment implies the protection of privacy, not just physical possession, and is parallel to DNA. Even before photocopies and data backups, "secure", when applied to "papers", obviously refers to the risk of disclosure of information without the owner's consent more than it does to the loss of that information. After all, truly important papers could have been manually copied and stored separately even in 1776.
And did you miss the first item on the list: "persons". Our constitution recognizes our bodies themselves and most immediate physical possessions as the first and most important thing the government should respect. Getting the DNA from a database somewhere rather than collecting it from the suspect should make no difference. We should be able to expect our own government to exercise reasonable respect for our privacy and act outside of the wishes of the obvious data owner only after getting a warrant to do so.
Your constitution is old. Modern, civilized countries (like European countries) update their constitutions, so that they don't become irrelevant, obsolete and dangerous as yours is. "The right to keep and bear arms"? The "right to free speech"? Puh-leeze. No civilized country needs this kind of nonsense. Throw that stupid old paper into the fire and join the modern world. If you can, that is. ;-)
Michael Usry Sr. was ONLY ONE ALLELE away from going to jail for the rest of his life!!
His father is the case you should be thinking about.
You think they would have paid attention to any alibi short of him being on live national TV or in prison at the time of the murder?
Part of the "validity" of DNA matching is that it is generally used as a method of confirmation: "Bob was seen have having an argument with the victim 20 hours before the body was found, He was having an affair with the victim's wife, there is only one chance in three billion that a random stranger has the same DNA profile...."
This is vastly different from collect and type the DNA. look in some databases. Then prove the person did the deed! .
This is the important part I think.