Most people don’t want to understand King as he actually existed as an activist and human being. they want to employ him to support their own moral authority.
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Asked why so many people would consent to give DNA, he said: “I have no idea. But criminals do stupid things.”
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Or they don’t realise their DNA will be on scene.
Or they figure, such as in a case where a crime happens in a public place, that their DNA being present is just circumstantial and doesn’t prove anything.
Or they’re scared of what happen when they refuse to consent.
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We need to be able to control our data on a fine grained level.
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DNA is tricky that way. If people won’t consent to a swab, police can get permission to go through their trash and find a pop can or beer bottle they’ve drunk from and use that. People litter their DNA all over the place, unwittingly, uncontrollably.
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Or they think that DNA is foolproof and will exclude them if they’re innocent.
Or they are assuming that the police will limit their search to the crime they’re currently investigating, rather than an older crime.
Or they’ve been pressured by hours of good-cop bad-cop interrogation to the point where they’re no longer able to think straight.
All good reasons why the first two rules of being involved in a police investigation (even if you think are solidly excluded from being a suspect) are: 1. shut up and 2. get a lawyer.
Sadly, the latter is out of reach of many people, and doing either will immediately make the police direct additional suspicion at you.
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Gattaca is getting closer and closer.
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Funny to be reading this question right now. I just got off a 1-hour phone conversation with my half-sister, who didn’t know I existed (her older sister never told her) until today. Her daughter and a friend took DNA tests together as a lark and when her matches populated late last night, I was at the top of the list.
If someone I’m related to gets caught for a crime they’ve committed because my DNA is available, that is a price I’m willing to pay, and I know I’m not the only person who has tested who feels that way.
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What about for the opposite of a crime? Like leaving water for people crossing the desert? The sado-system can use the evidence either way.
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I think that’s the key. It’s not the data; it’s how the data gets used.
Time was pathologists weren’t as strict as surgeons about scrubbing since their subjects were already dead. Then there was a case where DNA found on a murder victim was found to belong to a woman who had died three weeks before the murder – the pathologist had accidentally transferred DNA from one body to another.
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Without being willing to pay for expertise, which the police don’t do in favor of paying each other and general thieving, all it’s going to do is create more noise in the quality control legal system.
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Or another – I’d have to hunt it down – where a man was nearly convicted, and had the extreme good fortune to have a lawyer willing to question how he could commit murder and be in a hospital across town at the same time. He couldn’t remember what happened, because he’d been blackout drunk.
Turns out that the same paramedics who attended and took him to hospital, later attended the murder scene. They may have used the same finger cuff to take each man’s pulse.
You could bump into someone on the street, they could commit a crime and transfer your DNA to the scene, and suddenly your DNA was at the scene of a crime.
Do you know where you were on November 4th, 2018 at 2:25 PM? Can you prove it? Because DNA may say you were elsewhere.
We are rapidly reaching the point where it’s becoming evidentiarilly useless.
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Eek! I hadn’t heard about that one. Was it this case?
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They don’t need permission. Once you put your trash out, it’s considered public property. Then they’re free to run their dollar-store field test kits on it and send a SWAT team to assault you for drinking tea. Failure-prone DNA tests would most likely be the same.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=swat+team+tea+leaves+&t=ffab&ia=videos
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Yes! Thank you!
I think I read about it in a different source, but that’s the one!
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Imagine if he hadn’t been in the hospital, with independent records. Imagine if the transfer were from something like a delivery person’s debit machine. Think about how people think of DNA as the holy gospel of forensics. Scared, yet?
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Crossposting from Wanderthread:
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