INDIANA: Expanded Collection Of DNA From Felons Begins

OPINION: DNA is much more than a fingerprint," said attorney Maya Harris, director of the ACLU of Northern California's Racial Justice Project. "It opens a genetic window that reveals intimate information about you and your family, including predispositions to Alzheimer's disease, depression, multiple sclerosis and cancer. Law enforcement should not be allowed to seize that personal and private information.

Tue Aug 1, 7:33 AM ET
THE INDYCHANNEL.COM

Marion County on Monday became the first in the state to exercise a law requiring all Indiana felons convicted since July 1, 2005, to provide samples of DNA.

Until now, only felons who committed the most violent crimes had to provide DNA samples to authorities. But a law passed last year extends the requirement to people convicted of any felony.

Expanded DNA collection began Monday at the Marion County Probation Department. Collection elsewhere in the state will follow.

The DNA will be put into a state police database. Arguing that felons often commit crimes more than once in their lives -- the U.S. Justice Department says two-thirds of felons will commit another crime within three years of their release from prison -- advocates of the requirement say it will help police solve future cases and current cold ones.

"Some cases that have been stalled, there may be some matches," said Robert Bingham, chief of the Marion County Probation Department. "Some people are going to be arrested and held accountable for their actions."

Felons will submit DNA before being put on probation. Felons who already are on probation but were convicted since July 1, 2005, are being told to submit a DNA sample at a probation office, 6News' Jack Rinehart reported.

Local authorities believe it could take four months to collect DNA samples from Marion County probationers convicted in the last 12 months, Rinehart reported.

At the beginning of 2006, Marion County had more than 10,000 adults on probation. Two-thirds of them were felons.


OPINION: DNA is much more than a fingerprint," said attorney Maya Harris, director of the ACLU of Northern California's Racial Justice Project. "It opens a genetic window that reveals intimate information about you and your family, including predispositions to Alzheimer's disease, depression, multiple sclerosis and cancer. Law enforcement should not be allowed to seize that personal and private information.

Our government has a long, sad history of creating database that inevitably undergo what I will call 'function creep." By this I mean data bases that are created for one discrete purpose, yet despite initial promises of their creator, eventually take on new functions and purposes.

In the 1930's, for example, promises were made that the Social Security numbers would only be used as an aid for the new retirement program, but over the past 60 years they have become the universal identifier which their creators claimed they would not be. Similarly, census records created for general statistical purposes were used during World War II to round up innocent Japanese Americans and to place them in interment camps.

We are already beginning to see that function creep in DNA databases. In less than a decade, we have gone from collecting DNA from convicted sex offenders -- on the theory that they are likely to be recidivists and may leave biological evidence -- to creating data banks of all violent offenders, of all persons convicted of a crime, of juvenile offenders in 29 states, and now to proposals to DNA-test all arrestees.

There have even been proposals, like one made by the Michigan Commission on Genetic Privacy, to permanently preserve the blood samples of newborns -- purportedly obtained to detect rare congenital diseases -- and use them for law enforcement and research purposes. With those kinds of plans afoot, the phrase "innocent as a newborn babe" may soon become meaningless.

The amount of personal and private data contained in a DNA specimen makes its seizure extraordinary in both its nature and scope. DNA samples can provide insights into the most personal family relationships and the most intimate workings of the human body, including the likelihood of the occurrence of over 4,000 types of genetic conditions and diseases. There are many who will claim that there are genetic markers for aggression, substance addiction, criminal tendencies and sexual orientation.

And because genetic information pertains not only to the individual whose DNA is sampled, but to everyone who shares in that person's blood line, potential threats to genetic privacy posed by their collection extend well beyond the millions of people whose samples are currently on file.