Boy, I'm REALLY torn about this

Kathleen just brought me up to speed on California's Prop 69 (which isn't at ALL about what you'd think based on the number) which was approved back in 2004, fully implemented in 2009, and is now being challenged in the courts.

What it puts forward is the following: that anyone who is arrested on a felony charge is required to provide a DNA sample so it can be cross matched against DNA taken from other crimes and see if there's a hit. (There are similar laws on the books in many other states.) There seems little doubt that it will wind up in the Supreme Court. And I honestly don't know how I feel about it.

On the one hand, imagine a guy who's busted for having a couple of kilos of crack. They take his fingerprints and all that does is prove that he is who he says he is: a first time offender with no criminal record. And besides, he was wearing gloves when he strangled those five women in Colorado. But one of those women, in her death throes, scratched his face and there were DNA traces under her fingernails. Suddenly a simple drug arrest, for which he may have walked since he was a first-time offender, cracks a case and saves the lives of who-knows-how-many future victims. How could anyone in his right mind object to that scenario? After all, DNA evidence has been used to free many people falsely accused. Why shouldn't it be allowed to cut both ways? To save people who were innocent, and to nail bad guys who might otherwise have remained at liberty?

Except aren't there privacy issues? Fourth amendment issues? One of the plaintiffs in the current ACLU-supported case (the law was just upheld in the Federal appeals court) was arrested at an anti-war demonstration. Released, never charged. In California every year, one hundred thousand people are charged with felonies but ultimately cleared. Yet their DNA lives on in FBI files. Is everyone okay with this? On the surface you can think, "Well, sure, because I'll never commit a crime, so what does it matter if the Feds have my DNA forever?" Okay, but where does it stop? Look at Arizona, where you can more or less be arrested on the charge of driving while being Hispanic. If there's a violent crime in Phoenix, and a witness thinks he saw a dark-skinned man fleeing the scene, isn't there a temptation to start arresting Hispanics, Mexicans, any person of color on trumped up charges purely with the intention of testing their DNA and then kicking them loose, only to rearrest should they get a DNA hit? "Round up the usual genetic suspects." What's to stop a law mandating that DNA swabs be presented to the government for every newborn child on the off-chance he grows up to become a repeat offender? Bad enough that there are people out there backing a Physician Rape law for women contemplating abortion, advocating that government should be just small enough to fit into a vagina. Now government should be even smaller, small enough to get into our lives at a genetic level?

Let's take it out of the genetic arena. The law now (to my understanding) is that if you're pulled over for speeding, the officer doesn't have carte blanche to search your entire vehicle unless he has reason to suspect something is wrong (like, say, blood dripping out of your trunk.) How long before there's new laws stating that cops can search your car for any reason? Of course, you could say what's wrong with that? If it gives the cops a better chance of finding a body in the trunk, isn't that a good thing? I suppose it is. So if you just obey the speed limit and don't stick a corpse in the trunk, you'll be fine.

But the thing is, limits are placed on power–all power–for a reason. And the moment you toss any of those limits away, the temptation for abuse of that power always grows. And the people who are supposed to be protected from abuse of that power–namely those without power–are rendered that much more vulnerable.

It would be facile to say there's no easy answer to this, but that's not true. On the one hand, there's an easy answer: law enforcement agencies should be able to use every tool at their command to nail the bad guys. On the other hand, there's an easy answer: this is a clear Fourth amendment violation, illegal search and seizure being steamrolled in the interest of overzealous police enforcement.

So which way do I fall on the subject? Still haven't decided.

(Oh, and to make it easier for some of the usual suspects around here, here's a hint: Obama is in favor of it, so you'll know to be against it. You're welcome)

PAD