Keeping innocent people’s DNA causes distress and even suicide, says pioneer
Christopher Hope writes in the Daily Telegraph:
Keeping innocent people’s DNA on the national database causes such distress it has even forced one man to kill himself, the pioneer of fingerprinting technology told MPs.
Sir Alex Jeffreys, who invented the use of DNA profiles as a crime-fighting tool, said storing innocent people’s DNA gave them an unfair “presumption of guilt” in the eyes of the police.
The DNA database for England and Wales holds over five million profiles – the largest per head of population in the world – including an estimated one million people with no criminal conviction.
Sir Alex told MPs on the home affairs select committee that these innocent people should be removed immediately.
He said he had been frequently contacted by innocent people on the database to say how distressed they were.
One person had even committed suicide because of the “shame”, he said.
His concluding remarks are reported by Public Servant magazine:
“I’m not a lawyer but I always understood that one of the great foundations of English law was a presumption of innocence. What we’re seeing now is a presumption of future-possible-guiltyish-ness, but currently you may be innocent-ish. I find that a deeply worrying shift in the whole ethos of how the legal system operates.”
February 4th, 2010 at 12:23
I don’t think we even come in as ‘innocent-ish’ any more. An article in the Guardian last year, from a senior police officer, asserted that there were ‘the guilty’ and those ‘not yet convicted of an offence’.
It is only a matter of time, however, until we are all so convicted; the government is making so many catch-all laws that it will be nigh-on impossible not to be in breach of at least one of them and as we have see, once on the DNA database, the chances of your data being removed from it are very slim indeed.
February 5th, 2010 at 23:52
The article opsimath mentioned:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/apr/15/dna-database-policing