On the Dangers and Potential Abuses of DNA Familial Searching 163
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.
Non Story (Score:1, Insightful)
No mistake was made. The police checked a potential suspect and cleared him.
Re:Non Story (Score:5, Informative)
No mistake was made. The police checked a potential suspect and cleared him.
Well, this should cause anyone using a DNA service or donating their DNA to science to think twice:
The elder Usry, who lives outside Jackson, Mississippi, said his DNA entered the equation through a project, sponsored years ago by the Mormon church, in which members gave DNA samples to the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, a nonprofit whose forensic assets have been acquired by Ancestry.com, the world’s largest for-profit genealogy company.
What the actual fuck?
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Came here to say the same thing. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.
I would also add, that now we know how powerful wide collection nets of metadata can be (eg, NSA surveillance), I wonder if other types of donation, such as bone marrow registries, are going to be subpoenaed and how that will affect donations.
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Can you reasonably call a collection of DNA linked to names "meta" data? That's literally the most identifiable information possible.
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The public is increasingly fearful of the police. And it's THEIR FAULT.
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The public is increasingly fearful of the police. And it's THEIR FAULT.
Wasn't that defined as "assault" just a few comments up?
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Heh heh! Good pick-up, nicely done.
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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.
Ah yes, the classic "one crime deserves another" argument. Well done, sir. Surely beating down the doors of houses with battering rams is less of an inconvenience than being brutally murdered. Therefore by your logic, police shall go door to door with battering rams in every city that has an unsolved brutal murder. With your flawless logic, we shall protect everyone by rummaging through all of their possessions and taking DNA samples from them.
Well done. Bravo.
Re:or maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, the classic "one crime deserves another" argument.
No, it is the classic "one crime deserves citizens who provide reasonable assistance to pursue justice." If I find a murdered body while jogging, I am probably going to be one of the initial suspects. I will be questioned by officers, and possibly even called back to the precinct if they have further questions. This would absolutely inconvenience me, but I would be a real jackass if I put up a stink about it. Someone was just murdered, which would be a much bigger problem than me losing a couple afternoons.
Re:or maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)
If I find a murdered body while jogging, I am probably going to be one of the initial suspects. I will be questioned by officers, and possibly even called back to the precinct if they have further questions. This would absolutely inconvenience me, but I would be a real jackass if I put up a stink about it. Someone was just murdered, which would be a much bigger problem than me losing a couple afternoons.
And it is of the outmost importance that you keep the freedom to make that choice.
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If I find a murdered body while jogging, I am probably going to be one of the initial suspects. I will be questioned by officers, and possibly even called back to the precinct if they have further questions. This would absolutely inconvenience me, but I would be a real jackass if I put up a stink about it. Someone was just murdered, which would be a much bigger problem than me losing a couple afternoons.
And it is of the outmost importance that you keep the freedom to make that choice.
No I should absolutely not be given the legal ability to impede an investigation just because I don't feel like helping out. You can't force someone to report the dead body, but once the police have identified you as a potential suspect or key witness I am obliged to comply with the judicial system. I cannot ignore a subpoena just because I don't want to miss work.
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Well, that's essentially wordplay: technically, you ARE legally obliged to comply with the judicial system.
However, is the judicial system morally fair?
If you ever travel to Saudi Arabia with your wife, do you consider it fair to physically beat her because she may disagree with you?
Do you consider it morally right that a 12 year old girl can be married off?
Do you think the Patriot Act is morally right?
What about when US telco's broke the law and were granted r
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To clarify, you would be legally obliged to comply, but certainly not morally obliged.
In addition, there are various legal jurisdictions around the world where it indeed would be a crime to not report the dead body to the police. Again, this duty is a legal one, not an ethical one.
Well, I contend that you are morally obliged to comply and assist in both situations, but concede my moral viewpoint is not universally held. I didn't know that not reporting a crime was a crime though, although since I would have already felt morally obliged I guess it wouldn't have affected me.
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But the police have a responsibility to treat you as innocent until proven guilty. If they haul you down to the station 10 times without prior notice, use their search warrant to ransack your house and destroy your property, and do so in front of TV cameras, ruining your reputation and potentially causing you great financial harm in lost job/business, who wouldn't say "screw the dead guy, I have to worry about myself first".
On TV, the police are never respectful of suspects (except the rich ones, of course)
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Given news footage I have seen of someone's house after a search (which turned out to be based on an anonymous tip), I'd say TV has it right. They ripped sheet rock from the walls, destroyed furniture, and spread the insides of their mattresses over the floor. They didn't even apologize when it was over.
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Well, this is one of those questions that has a few big fat "depends" attached to the answer.
If they were just going to throw away that information, I unqualifiedly agree with you. No reasonable person would refuse to give their DNA if it would be thrown away as soon as it had exonerated them.
But what if they intend to *keep* that information and use it to match against future crimes? Then a reasonable person might well pause. One obvious uncertainty is what future versions of the government considers a "
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The statistics are tricky there. The odds against a perfect false match to a particular bit of evidence are quite high. The odds of a false familial match against a degraded sample from ANY crime scene are quite different. I can't imagine why anyone would want to effectively sign up to be a go-to suspect.
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My point is this: how do we *know* the odds against a perfect false match are as high as we think they are?
I know the way people do these calculations, which is they take p(x1) * p(x2) *... p(xn) as the probability. But note that the validity of this calculation is dependent upon the assumption that the events x1, x2 ... xn are all independent of each other, which if you think about what DNA is is bound not to be true. So I guess you choose x1 ... xn so that they are independent-ish -- that is to say they
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There is, in fact, evidence that your concerns are well founded. I wish I had a reference for it but the research demonstrated an uncomfortable likelihood that a search against a large pool of DNA profiles would nearly inevitably return several false matches.
And that was before considering that few DNA samples are perfect in the first place.
A lot of people would have a lot less confidence in DNA matches if they knew that really only a tiny sampling of the DNA's characteristics are spot checked for a match.
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I think most telling was a test where a group of fingerprint analysts was given a fair number of samples to analyse. Some of them were duplicates. The finding was that they not only disagreed with each other, they sometimes unknowingly disagreed with themselves.
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People would be more willing to cooperate if doing so wasn't so frequently punished even when you're innocent.
Law enforcement and our 'justice system' need to drill it into their skulls that unless they are very careful, the process of investigating and ultimately finding a person not guilty is itself an ordeal that amounts to punishment of the innocent.
It's no wonder people prefer to be left out of it rather than cooperate.
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Forth amendment?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] 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".
Do we want 100% crimes solved? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 poss
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"The "(un)reasonable" standard is so vague, almost anything can be argued in and out of it."
I find that an unreasonable stance. Joke aside, that is true of any standard, really.
You know that when you attempt to spell everything out, you will miss some, include incorrect things, etc. You cant enumerate it all.
"The anonymous grandparent is right in that DNA-samples (and fingerprints) could be collected from everyone, and it would help police immensely."
True. I never said it was not possible.
It is liable to
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No, some standards are more vague than others.
Suppose, as is the case described in TFA, they have a DNA-sample (or finger-print) from the crime-scene, for which no matches exist in police databases. Currently they have to look for him the old-fashioned way — and the sample is only useful to (in)validate the people.
If instead there existed a nation- or eve
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Unfortunately in this case, they did not use the sample they had to invalidate the suspect they wrongfully convicted, but instead came up with a theory on how three men assaulted and murdered the victim in her small apartment room and only one of them (the one they couldn't identify) le
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Police didn't convict him — a jury did. This is an important difference.
Yes, police could've asked the court to vacate the judgement because of new evidence, but — in this particular case, according to TFA — they suspected there were multiple attackers.
Their being able to identify the new suspect promptly would've helped the convict — if he were innocent.
No, a reliable (inter)national database
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If the governments had the courage to do it, every citizen or resident of the country should be compelled to give DNA samples. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for any ordinary citizen to protest or oppose this. Indeed any opposition should be viewed as a reason for suspicion.
Because of course there is absolutely no chance for abuse, such as DNA planting, or error, such as cross-contamination.
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I'm reminded of the 'serial killer' who raged across Europe for many years. It turned out that the DNA of the 'serial killer' was actually from the woman who packaged the cotton swabs.
It also turned out that they bought sterile swabs meant for medical use, but not swabs clear of DNA meant for forensic investigation.
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That could be said for any investigative technique. Simpletons said the same about CCTV but now no sane person would deny the benefits of video surveillance. It *works*. It helps *reducing crime*. Those are cold facts. We need to slay that last sacred cow and make another step towards a safer society. And it will happen, whether you want it or not.
I'm not arguing against DNA testing, moron. I'm arguing against compulsory collection of DNA samples from every resident of the country as the OP claimed that there was "absolutely no reason whatsoever to oppose this." If you want to compare to CCTV, that would be equivalent to requiring every resident to have a camera recording their movements 24/7.
Re:Non Story...Not Exactly... (Score:2)
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 i
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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". O
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I'll bet that 'suspect' would have preferred not to be molested by the police over what was akin to a fishing expedition. They had no actual evidence that he committed the crime. It seems doubtful that it was actually probable cause.
They certainly owed him the courtesy of QUICKLY letting him know he had no need to worry about further suspicion hanging over him. Like doing their test IMMEDIATELY and letting him know within a couple days of taking the sample.
System worked, then? (Score:5, Informative)
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....
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If you are referring to the DNA clearing the guy -- then yes the 'system worked'. However, you are overlooking the fact that this familial DNA technique caused an innocent man to be inconvenienced and harassed.
Why are people so complacent about the abuses of police and judicial system. A warrant should have never been issued for such a lousy technique.
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If you are referring to the DNA clearing the guy -- then yes the 'system worked'. However, you are overlooking the fact that this familial DNA technique caused an innocent man to be inconvenienced and harassed.
Why are people so complacent about the abuses of police and judicial system. A warrant should have never been issued for such a lousy technique.
This isn't an abuse. This is the system working (as well as it can, though getting him in to the office on a lie is kind of skeevy). And since even the cleared suspect is considering the branches of his family tree even he's buying into the validity of the technique.
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And since even the cleared suspect is considering the branches of his family tree even he's buying into the validity of the technique.
He's "buying into" it because they tell him it works. Except it doesn't. From earlier in the article:
"Following this new lead, the police mapped out five generations of Usry’s family, narrowing their focus to three men.
Only one, the New Orleans filmmaker, fit the mold of a plausible suspect, according to an application for a search warrant. "
So it only led to one plausible suspect, and he was innocent. Meanwhile, this guy essentially lost a month of his life (I'm sure this guy didn't get much of anyth
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Why should he have been worried for a month? He knew perfectly well he was innocent. Unless he'd been banging the victim, there was no way the DNA match was going to come back positive (other than him having an identical twin who was a serial killer). It's not like he was all "ohmygod they've finally found me out!!! I'm going to go to prison!!!!!"....
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You do know that only a very small sliver of DNA is actually tested. There is a high change of collision when you are actually searching for familiar matching, you are basically searching for a birthday paradox here.
There are calculations that have shows for every DNA there are 3000 people who will match it within the USA itself.
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It's for this reason that I support the use of DNA to exonerate people - "It can't be him, his DNA doesn't match" and to identify potential suspects, but never to convict - "It must be him, this tiny subset of his DNA matches, assuming no flaws in our processes, no contamination and ignoring the other 3000 people with that same subset, 18 of whom live in the same town"
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Have you not been paying attention the last few years? Government enforcers -- local and three-letter -- have established that they're willing to ignore the law and evidence in favour of roughing up and incarcerating somebody -- anybody -- regardless of whether or not they're actually guilty of anything.
Re:System worked, then? (Score:5, Insightful)
My understanding is that DNA matches are generally not accurate enough to be accepted by scientists as a conclusive match, though perhaps the techniques have improved since then. That's actually a big part of the problem with them - people believe them to be considerably more accurate than they actually are. Maybe they're even 99% accurate, but that would still mean that there's a 1 in 100 chance that you'll come up as a false positive: enough to worry about I'd say. And if the accuracy isn't even that good... well it makes DNA databases being used for identification a bit worrying. Not so much because they're not useful, but because the police, lawyers, judge, and jury all tend to believe that a match is far more conclusive than it really is. Especially the jury, whose familiarity with DNA evidence comes from daytime television, where it *always* fingers the guilty party.
Basically nobody involved is likely to have the grasp of statistics necessary to properly parse the results - even doctors, who you would expect to deal with false positives/negatives all the time often get it wrong. Test is 90% accurate, that means if you come up positive there's a 90% chance you've got the disease, right? Wrong. You also need to factor in the independent chance of actually having the disease. Say there's a 2% chance that a person chosen at random is infected: that means out of 100 people you will (on average) have 10 false positives and two actual positives: testing positive only means there's a 2/12 (17%) chance you're infected.
Now consider DNA evidence - let's be generous and say it's 99.999% accurate: there's 400 million people in the US, so you can expect there will be 400,000 false positives, only one of which actually be guilty. Me, I don't like those odds.
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Sorry, math error, that last line should be "4,000 false positives" - still more than enough to make me nervous
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Nope, this is exactly why such things are so dangerous in courtrooms and doctor's offices: combinatorial statistics is *slippery* without lots of experience. Let's walk through it step by step:
Start with 100 people representing a typical sample of the population, and give them all the test:
- The test is only 90% accurate, so 10 will come up with false positives
- 2% actually have the disease, so we'll get 2 real positives (ignoring the possibility of false-negatives)
- So, out of 100 people who took the test
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"Why should he have been worried for a month? He knew perfectly well he was innocent."
The legal/judicial system we have is not perfect. We read occasionally about people that are released from prison after being falsely found guilty ( with limits for error there as well... ).
So, knowing you are innocent and not worrying are not mutually exclusive.
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He worried because innocence doesn't necessarily result in a good outcome in criminal proceedings. If it actually goes to trial, bankruptcy is often the reward for the innocent. Other times, they end up convicted anyway and lose years of their lives (or simply lose their life in the case of capital murder).
So he was more like "OMG they think I brutally murdered someone, I'm going to prison and I didn't even do it!"
Re:System worked, then? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't an abuse. This is the system working (as well as it can, though getting him in to the office on a lie is kind of skeevy). And since even the cleared suspect is considering the branches of his family tree even he's buying into the validity of the technique.
There was no concrete evidence, only circumstancial. I find it extremely worrying that he was brought in under false pretenses and that they granted a court order for the DNA sample before any request had been made to him for a voluntary submission.
Even if someone is your only suspect, he shouldn't be treated as a "prime suspect" without evidence. Usry says in the article that he was worried that they were going to push for charges even when the sample came back negative, and it was the police and FBI's treatment of him that made him worried. It wouldn't have been the first time that an overzealous law enforcement officer had got so fixated on "getting a result" that they would have pushed on, ignoring the evidence.
The biggest warning light in the article is actually an innocent-looking remark from the Sgt in the case: " “I wish it wasn’t a dead end, but it was.”" I know it's important to solve crimes, but no police officer should ever be disappointed to find out a suspect is innocent. Do you think that one-month wait was lab time? I doubt it. During all that time, some of the officers and agents involved may well have been pushing to continue, on the grounds that he probably passed through the town once, and they think it was a cousin of his, so they would be arguing that he "probably" drove his cousin up and was an accessory.
There is always the danger with these speculative searches that you end up identifying a suspect then convincing yourself he's the guy, then confirmation bias leads the officers to build a case around lots of selective evidence. In a cold case, you'd be essentially building a "loser edit" for the poor sod you've picked.
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There was no concrete evidence, only circumstancial.
It is a myth that circumstantial evidence is in some way useless. (probably caused by too many cop TV shows) It is not as good as direct evidence, but it is still good enough to obtain a conviction. For instance if you find the murder weapon and it has the suspect's DNA on it, you only have direct evidence than his DNA was in fact on the knife. It is circumstantial evidence of the suspect actually committing the murder, since you don't know for a fact how the DNA got on the knife. It could be enough to conv
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For instance if you find the murder weapon and it has the suspect's DNA on it, you only have direct evidence than his DNA was in fact on the knife. It is circumstantial evidence of the suspect actually committing the murder, since you don't know for a fact how the DNA got on the knife.
But that's a world apart from "someone probably (but not definitely) related to him did it, and he happens to know a few people who lived somewhere in the sort of vicinity, even though he didn't".
Re: System worked, then? (Score:2)
I can only imagine how ineffective the police would be if they couldn't even investigate someone until they already had irrefutable proof they were guilty.
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You're right. And thats the point. Circumstantial evidence including DNA evidence should never be sufficient to convince us that there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. You should need an eyewitness, clear video footage, etc in addition to a DNA match, etc. Simply because someone happens to be at a location at a given time or around that time and made calls to the person murdered, etc. might make them a suspect, but it shouldn't be enough to convict. Nor should DNA evidence alone. With a mere 99.8% accuracy that means that with billions of people on the planet that without additional evidence there will be wrongful convictions if used alone to gain a conviction.
First off you are crossing back and forth between not liking circumstantial evidence and not liking the accuracy of DNA evidence. Even if DNA evidence was 100% effective, you still have the issue of circumstantial evidence tying them to the actual murder (instead of just to the knife). And if you have eyewitness or clear video footage you may not have to rely on circumstantial evidence, but you do have to deal with the same accuracy problems of DNA. Even the most high resolution video camera probably has fa
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People need to understand that no one has ever been convicted with 100% certainty in the history of history.
That statement is doubtful.
Okay, I should have said "In a court of law". Someone summarily executed by someone after conferring with other witnesses right after the event happened knew with 100% certainty in some situations. But as soon as it goes to court the probability lessens.
A jurist needs to weigh the possibility of inaccurate memory, a massive conspiracy, etc. They may still be effectively 100% sure of guilt, but still not truly 100% sure.
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So the system is working is proved by finding some random fool to pin a crime on? And its ok to violate due process and basic logic and reasoning just because the cops had a 1 in 1 billion shot at finding the suspect...?
I mean, this is a man that lives in New Orleans. Did they even check whether this person even came to Idaho? Has he ever been even close to Idaho?
Why did they come after him in the first place? Because they have no clue who did it and they are scrapping the bottom of the barrel. We all
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"Usry said he regarded his experience as an invasion of privacy"
He is also an almost unknown New Orleans film maker who is now making a documentary about a well known murder case that he has a personal connection to and is getting national attention.
Re: System worked, then? (Score:1)
But a witness could've just as easily caused the same thing. "It was John Doe my next door neighbor!" When people are talking about police abuse, this is not it.
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So, just because a non-police citizen can lie about what they witnessed, then it's OK for the police to use lousy techniques with known flaws? WTF?
You do realize providing false evidence in an investigation is a crime in itself in a lot of (most?) jurisdictions, right?
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This would also kill all the cop shows on TV.
"It wasn't until a month after the extraction that they told him he'd been cleared." -- this realistic timeframe for analysis would also kill all cop shows on TV.
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"Will the test results incriminate the accused? Will the police have to keep up with their tireless searching for evildoers? Tune in next week, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, when we won't answer these questions! Then in two weeks, we probably won't answer them again! But if you tune in a month from now, we'll find the answers to these pressing questions!!"
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Detectives traveled to New Orleans in December and persuaded a magistrate judge to sign a search warrant ordering Usry to provide his DNA for comparison.
The caller identified himself as a law enforcement official in New Orleans and said he was investigating a hit-and-run in City Park.
They got a court order without ever asking the guy to help with their enquiries. They brought him in with an outright lie and forced him to give a DNA sample. That's treatment unwarranted by the evidence, whatever the judge thinks.
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You missed the important quotes of the article:
âoeI didnâ(TM)t take it as a big deal,â Usry said. âoeHe said he wanted to get together, ask a couple of questions and take a couple pictures of my car.â Knowing he had nothing to hide, Usry agreed to meet
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No, I am referring to the whole "got a warrant, executed it, etc" process. Unlike, say, GCHQ or NSA, they didn't break the law in the process of investigating this guy. There was no miscarriage of justice to be found - he was a suspect, they determined (using legal means) that he wasn't the perp, done.
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How often does that *not* happen during a police investigation - everyone who is interviewed or classed as a suspect that is later cleared undergoes the same "issue", its part of the process of the police investigation. If they had to avoid such an "issue", no police investigation would ever go anywhere.
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Innocent people are inconvenienced and harassed all the time by unreliable evidence and eye witness testimony. Some are even convicted. The false positive rate for familial DNA is way down in the noise level. Why not point your outrage at the harassment of blacks on the streets of every major city.
Because unlike you, we have sufficient neural capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time and thus are also able to criticize police for multiple lousy practises at once.
Re:System worked, then? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem here, if there is one (and I am with you on not being so sure there is) just how far removed from an event under investigation do you need to before you can't be subject to warrants related to it.
Right now a Judge or Magistrate basically determines this. I am not sure what standards may exist beyond probably cause of finding evidence. So here we have a guy where there is nothing at all to tie him to the events except DNA match that is actually exculpatory in that its clear he isn't a match for the sample the Police believe is that of the perps; however it does indicate he may be a family member however distant. The police want to confirm this. Is it reasonable to "search" his blood to confirm the match, and is that than cause to search everyone one of his relations, and their offspring?
Its kinda like the NSA's 3 degrees thing, does this simply open the door to the government being free to collect DNA samples form most citizens? We do need to look at some old assumptions in the face of new tech. In the past you had to manually do DNA compares between two samples, now you digitize results and search a database. Where you would not in the past have do a comparison with someone who could not have committed the crime now you effective compare with every sample taken from everywhere. Based on those past assumptions we figured limiting collection to convicts, voluntary submitters, and those we had probable cause for protected most folks privacy. An situation like this would be rare; if it did happen we probably would have permitted it; thinking the scope was highly limited, now it could easily pull most of us in.
Re:System worked, then? (Score:5, Interesting)
So here we have a guy where there is nothing at all to tie him to the events except DNA match that is actually exculpatory in that its clear he isn't a match for the sample the Police believe is that of the perps; however it does indicate he may be a family member however distant. The police want to confirm this. Is it reasonable to "search" his blood to confirm the match, and is that than cause to search everyone one of his relations, and their offspring?
Your summary may be a bit too brief for the nuances here. It appears that the police found a partial DNA match with the suspect's father (in, remarkably, a privately-maintained - not state-controlled - DNA database), which in turn suggested that a close relative would be match. The police then examined publicly-available genealogy information to identify candidate relatives. From the genealogy records the police narrowed their search to three candidate individuals. Using various other circumstantial information they finally sought a warrant to collect a DNA sample from just one individual.
While I agree that there are legitimate "slippery-slope" concerns, based on the (admittedly brief) description in the linked article, it seems that in this particular instance reasonable steps were taken to minimize the scope and inconvenience (to potentially-innocent individuals) of the investigation. It wasn't a scattershot "We must test the DNA of all your male relatives!", but rather "We want to test the DNA of your one male relative whom we also suspect for reasons (a), (b), and (c)."
Re:System worked, then? (Score:5, Insightful)
But they didn't suspect him at all. They found their suspect first, then constructed a circumstantial case (a, b and c) against him.
This is dangerous shit and the police should get slapped for it. And the public needs to step up and make it clear to judges that we won't tolerate them rubber stamping bullshit warrants. Just because there was a happy ending this time doesn't mean that we aren't playing with fire. This guy came one lab mistake away from from having his life ruined.
There was a time when most of us understood the dangers of working from desired conclusion to supporting facts. But now we celebrate people that work backwards, from cop shows on TV to "scientists" paid to push a political agenda.
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But they didn't suspect him at all. They found their suspect first, then constructed a circumstantial case (a, b and c) against him.
At the very beginning of any police investigation, police don't - or at least aren't supposed to - start out suspecting anybody at all. They are given (or they collect) information which leads to suspicions: testimony by victims or other witnesses, surveillance video, credit card and phone records, fingerprints, blood or semen at the crime scene.
In this case, the police found one line of evidence - DNA from semen - that strongly suggested the crime was committed by one member of a family. They then used
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It is a question of false positives. Fuzzy queries against huge databases give results. They are almost always false.
Given a large database and the ability to do inexact queries, the conditional probability that you are looking at the guilty party, given a hit, is damn near zero. Statistically speaking, a hit is indistinguishable from a miss. And in this case, no one in the database committed the rape, no one related to anyone in the database committed the rape, and yet, the query returned a hit.
If you
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Bingo.
The notion that one should bear the blame for a crime based on the notion that a family member may have been present is just disgusting. This is not Star Trek, and we are not Klingons.
This should have been a career-ender for everyone involved... cops, judge, their supervisors; the whole bloody lot of them should be tossed out into the cold as unfit to serve the public under any circumstances.
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The notion that one should bear the blame for a crime based on the notion that a family member may have been present is just disgusting. This is not Star Trek, and we are not Klingons.
It's very fortunate that that isn't what happened, then, isn't it?
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The system did not work, the warrant should have never been issued it was a fishing expedition wrapped up in "science". To start the used a commercial DNA database aka someplace that sucker innocents into submitting DNA samples (ancestry.com) for genealogical purposes with promises of anonymity and control. The first warrant broke that anonymity and led to the guys father even though they knew he was not a suspect. They then got a warrant to forcibly sample the son with the extra info of apparently he ha
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sooner or later the police will be able to match everybodys DNA
To the X number of people that are a 99.9% match.
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Except now his police file says: "suspect in murder case, not proved"
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From TFA:
“I had lots of days sitting at the house with the dog,” he recalled in an interview, “wondering if these guys were going to use a battering ram to bust open the door and shoot my dog after he started barking at them.”
Sadly, we cannot claim his fear was unjustified. It certainly isn't without precedent.
Where is the abuse? (Score:2)
They identified a suspect based on evidence and eliminated him using evidence.
How is that abuse?
Re:Where is the abuse? (Score:4, Insightful)
They identified a suspect based on evidence and eliminated him using evidence.
How is that abuse?
Because they used one piece of "evidence" (very tenuous at best) and just cast out a wide net to suspect someone from half the country away. It's the same as if a witness of a crime in New York said the suspect was 6'2" and blond so the police start interviewing 6'2" blond people living in Utah. Partial DNA matches should not be enough to get a warrant for someone who lives 1700 miles from where the crime occurred, especially if there is no other corroborating evidence.
No it's not (Score:2)
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.
All DNA Evidenceis overrated (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:All DNA Evidenceis overrated (Score:4, Informative)
Ancestry Database (Score:2)
Re:Ancestry Database (Score:4, Insightful)
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similar to classic fingerprints (Score:2)
Law of Small Numbers (Score:2)
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.
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Right on. I have used the Ancestry Y chromosome database and had a hit where ALL the alleles matched. I emailed the guy and we can't figure out how were are related: It's definitely way more than the number of generations Ancestry suggested was likely. So if one allele doesn't match you could be talking a common ancestor many generations back. That's not exactly a close relative.
Ancestry's predictions for how close a match were not very accurate for the Y chromosome database. In fact, they aren't usin
Re:wtf (Score:4, Interesting)
At least at common law assault is the "putting in of fear", and battery has "physical contact" so if you killed them without scaring or physically touching them it would be possible.
For example if you crawled under their car at night and partially loosed the bleed screws on their breaks, and cut the line on the mechanical break; knowing they would porbably have enough fluid to get onto the interstate in heavy traffic for their morning commute before discovering anything was wrong. If they do get killed, I can see that leading to murder conviction without assault or battery.
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Re:wtf (Score:4, Interesting)
It depends on the delivery method.
If it's, for example, cyanide in your coffee, it wouldn't.
On the other hand, if it's a large barrel of cyanide catapulted in your general direction, it's assault. (It you fail your dodge roll, it's also battery)
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Would poison be considered assault or just murder?
It depends on the delivery method.
If it's, for example, cyanide in your coffee, it wouldn't.
Just to clarify - I'm sure you meant "it wouldn't" to the assault; it would certainly be murder
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IAL. Poisoning is considered battery in pretty much all jurisdictions within the U.S. In order for it to be assault, the victim has to have an apprehension that the battery is going to occur.
Also, as to the GP's point, bleeding the brakes on a car could be considered battery, too, since the contact need not be direct. It's legally analagous to throwing a rock at someone - you are putting an object in motion intending that it will cause a harmful physical contact with someone. The only difference is that in
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poison
cut brake lines
waterproof pda playing reality tv episodes in a loop on the bottom of their swimming pool (might not work for all Slashdotters but would work with a good percentage of the population)
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mod up 1 Re:Think! His father saved by a mismatch (Score:2)
This is the important part I think.