Maura Dolan of the L.A. Times has an article that explains how familial DNA searching caught “The Grim Sleeper,” a serial killer who was charged Thursday with 10 counts of murder.
Familial searching has been done for years in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, but technical, legal and ethical concerns have kept the FBI from pursuing it in the United States, where California and Colorado are the only two states that have embraced it fully.
. . . .
Skeptics have argued that familial searches invade the privacy of people who happen to have a relative in the database and may violate constitutional guarantees against unwarranted searches. So far, however, no one has challenged the use of familial searching in California, and an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday that the state’s handling of the Grim Sleeper case made the group “more comfortable” with the process.
“From our perspective, if you are going to use familial DNA searching, this is the kind of case you should use it for, and the kind of precautions they took in this case are the kind that should be taken,” said Peter Bibring, staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California.
My, my. It sounds like everyone is pretty much hunky-dory with familial searching!
Well, nothing succeeds like success. I hate to be the guy who has to remind you how Dolan and Jason Felch, the L.A. Times‘s self-appointed “experts” on DNA, had a hand-wringing article in November 2008 that whined and moaned about the allegedly horrific privacy violations involved in familial searching:
But the idea of scrutinizing families based exclusively on their possible genetic relationship to an unknown suspect makes privacy advocates and legal experts nervous. They argue that it effectively expands criminal databases to include every offender’s relatives, a potentially unconstitutional intrusion.
“There is kind of a queasiness about having the sins of your father come back to haunt you,” said Stanford University law professor Hank Greely, who supports familial searching despite those concerns. “It feels like we’re holding people responsible for the crimes of their family.”
Because the technology isn’t perfect, families with no connection to the perpetrator inevitably will be investigated, some scientists and legal experts say.
Oh, my God! Innocent people might be investigated, in a criminal investigation, just because there is some reason to suspect they might be involved!
As I said at the time:
I have news for you, L.A. Times: as with any other human endeavor, criminal investigation in general isn’t perfect. People with no connection to the perpetrator will inevitably be investigated at times.
Does that mean we should stop investigating crime? Since when do we not investigate leads just because they could initially point investigators in the wrong direction?
Understand clearly what is going on here. We’re talking about searching people who are already in the database, to see if they might be a sibling of the person who did the murder.
If there is a close enough match, then — as with any other lead based on evidence — the lead may pan out or it may not.
Here’s an analogy. Let’s say that a young woman is kidnapped, held in a home, sexually abused, and eventually released. During her ordeal, she sneaks into a room and overhears the suspect saying to someone on the phone: “Take the money to my brother James. He just got out of prison and he’s living over on Cedar St.”
An investigator could search property records databases, to see if anyone named James lives on Cedar St. If he finds one or more such people, he could attempt to learn whether any of those Jameses has a brother. He could search criminal databases to see whether any such brothers were recently released from prison.
Or, he could just do nothing, out of deference to some insane phantom privacy concern on the part of innocent people with brothers on Cedar Street named James.
Searching the database for one’s relatives seems less intrusive than, say, knocking on doors in a neighborhood where a murder has occurred. Can you believe the incredible privacy violation involved when authorities with badges and guns come knocking on the door of your home — your sanctuary! your castle! — merely because you happen to live near the murder?!?!
Oh, the intrusion! Oh, the invasion of privacy! Privacy advocates are nervous! It feels like we’re holding people responsible for living near the scene of a crime!!!!
Yet homicide detectives routinely do door-knocks to look for witnesses, and no rational person objects. What’s the difference here?
Now that we have a serial killer in custody, everyone is singing a different tune. The privacy advocates are pretty much keeping their mouths shut — and Dolan and Felch, who have screwed the pooch on too many DNA stories to count, are keeping the whining to a minimum.
I guess they hope that the next time they want to bitch about this effective crime-fighting technique, you will have forgotten about the murderer it caught.