Police are now interviewing suspects in a murder case in which the bodies of a mother and her daughter were discovered over a thousand miles apart and in two different Australian states. Karlie Pearce-Stevenson's remains were found in the Belanglo state forest and years later the body of her two year old daughter - Khandalyce - was dumped in a suitcase beside a highway in South Australia.
Once again the miracle of DNA enabled a connection to be made, despite these bodies being discovered years apart, but this important test is still resented by many people who claim it is the construction of a DNA database - by stealth !
What is called the "Guthrie Test " has been in operation since the 1970's. A spot of blood is taken from the heel of all new borns forty-eight to seventy-two hours after birth. This permanent record of DNA is on the public register and is fast becoming a tool used when body recognition is an issue.
Eventually - with the passage of time - every resident born in Australia will have their DNA recorded on that register and the only exceptions will be tourists here on a visit or migrants born in a country that does not conduct these tests and who has migrated to this country.
Some civil liberties people claim that this is an intrusion on a persons right to privacy. It all depends on whether the state has a right to our personal identification - by way of fingerprints and a photographic image of our face - or if we can refuse to supply a sample on privacy grounds - and clearly we can not !
A photograph is required when we apply for either a driving license or a passport and if we are a suspect in a crime the authorities can obtain a court order to examine our fingerprints if we refuse.
The sticking point seems to be that the authorities must first have a reason to make that demand, while with DNA it is a matter of submitting matter found at a crime scene to the database to discover who is the owner of that form of evidence.
The technology involved in DNA testing is ever increasingly narrowing. It is almost impossible for a person not to leave some form of evidence, to the extent that soon even their breathe may be traceable after a period of time. We are seeing many "cold cases "from a distant age being solved simply because DNA collected then is being subjected to modern testing - and delivering results that were not possible at the time the crime was committed.
We accept that the police have the right to put the DNA of convicted criminals on record so that this can be compared to future crime scenes, and both convict or acquit that person of complicity as a result. Different laws in different states allow or restrict police access to national data bases but it seems inevitable that eventually they will come into the public realm.
There seems little real difference to the thinking that accompanied the introduction of roadside breath testing to detect alcohol and drugs. Some saw that as a privacy intrusion, but if we choose to drink and drive it requires a mechanism to detect a breach of the law. It follows that if we choose to commit a crime there is little difference in using DNA to make us accountable for that action.
Hopefully, the ever increasing likelihood of technology sheeting home the blame for crime - may cause a drop in the crime rate !
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