DNA sample should follow arrest

Op-Ed published in Tacoma News Tribune on Feb. 20, 2009

What’s more important: the right of crime victims and society to get justice and prevent more victims or the rights of suspects and those worried about a Big Brother police state?

It’s a fair question, and it’s coming up with the proposed Katie’s Law legislation, which would expand the use DNA samples in police work by taking samples upon arrest for certain felonies. Right now, we take samples upon conviction.

Opponents raise two major questions, and each is worth debating.

• Does taking DNA samples give the police too much power – and private medical information – which could be abused?

For years, police have been taking DNA samples after conviction and using them to match criminals to cold cases, especially rapes and murders. These expanded powers have only been used for good. DNA matches have led police to serial rapists and murderers. DNA has also freed people wrongly convicted and sitting in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

People may also worry that a cheek swab might give police medical information about anyone they arrest. That worry is misplaced. Police don’t have the expensive equipment, as medical labs do, to test a cheek swab and get results about possible diseases and medical traits.

Scientists worked with police to come up with a way to use DNA for one purpose alone: identify people, as fingerprints do. They only check 13 to 15 parts – out of 3 million – of the human genome, and each part was specifically chosen because it had no medical usefulness.

Even if the police wanted to abuse the rules by finding out medical information about a suspect, they couldn’t use DNA to do it.

• Is taking DNA upon arrest constitutional?

A defense lawyer who testified at a hearing in Olympia said that he doubted Katie’s Law would pass muster with either our state Constitution or the U.S. Constitution. He said it was an unconstitutional search, that a warrant would be needed to swab the cheek of a suspected criminal. To date, the courts have not made such a determination.

When people get arrested today, police take their mug shot and fingerprints. This is to positively identify them so they can’t get away with lying about who they are.

Criminals don’t want to be identified because they don’t usually stop with one crime. They’re wanted for other bad acts, and they know it.

Taking fingerprints revolutionized police work. Instead of having police guess whether or not a suspect was lying about their name – and only dumb criminals would tell the truth – they could run fingerprints to find out the real name and identity of most suspects, because they’d been arrested before.

Just like with DNA, ordinary people who hadn’t been arrested before had nothing to worry about with fingerprints, because they’d never been printed. The funny thing is, innocent people could actually get away with lying about their name if they really wanted to, because nobody had their fingerprints.

Swabbing someone’s cheek for DNA is just the 21st century’s version of fingerprints, except it’s more accurate and more useful. That’s because rapists and serial killers don’t always leave fingerprints. But they almost always leave traces of DNA during a sexual assault.

They do leave traces of skin and blood under the fingernails of victims like Katie Sepich, who fought for her life, and even after her body was burned by the killer, police scientists could get good samples that led police to her killer and put him in prison.

At the hearing in Olympia, I asked the criminal defense lawyer and ACLU representative to name a case where police had abused DNA evidence – just one case where detectives tapped into medical information or otherwise misused this science. They couldn’t name a single case.

What we do know are the names of the criminals, rapists like Carlos Anthony Dias here in Pierce County, who’ve been brought to justice with this new tool.

And we know the names of the victims like Katie Sepich who could have been saved if we’d had DNA on arrest.

State Rep. Christopher Hurst, D-Enumclaw, is a retired undercover detective and commander of a homicide task force. He is chairman of the Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Committee.

To view the story online, click here.