Innocent Until Sampled
According to the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion column:
Matthew Zarb-Cousin, a Labour candidate for Thorpe Bay in Southend, wrote recently on Labourlist.org that “a database, where swabs of DNA are taken at birth—and of people coming into the country—is not only fair but also vital…. the only logical objection I could possibly have to it is if I planned to commit a crime in the near future.”
The unspoken assumption of Mr. Zarb-Cousin and other proponents of universal DNA collection is that this database will only be used for good, and that we can trust its keepers to neither misuse nor abuse it. This seems a bit like saying that politicians can be trusted to treat parliamentary expenses policies with the appropriate respect for taxpayer money—a proposition that these days looks shaky at best in the U.K. More serious still is the potential for abuse for political gain, on an individual or mass scale.
At present, the most easily imaginable threat comes from human error. If police and prosecutors were infallible, there would be no need for safeguards such as a presumption of innocence or trial by jury, which have been enshrined in the common law for centuries. In part, these protections reflect the fact that efficiency of law-enforcement must be balanced against the dangers of misapplication of the law, mistakes and, yes, sometimes even malice. While technology may have changed the details, the principles remain the same. As with laws against unreasonable search and seizure, people deserve the right not to have their genetic profile checked against every crime scene in the land.
