Effective October 12th, anyone convicted of a felony or penal law misdemeanor in the state of New York will have to provide a sample for the state's DNA databank.
Calling DNA a “state-of-the-art mechanism to find the truth”, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the measure into law on Monday and my hands are still raw from applauding.
Of course, the collection of DNA samples from John Q. Public has always been harangued as an invasion of privacy by civil libertarians and their ilk, often spouting arguments based on the DNA profiles ending up in the wrong hands.
What if, they argue, you were turned down for a job because your prospective employer found out you had the “lazy” gene? Or you were denied coverage because your insurance company determined you were at risk for diabetes? The problem with these arguments is that there is never any consideration given to how employers or insurance companies would gain access your DNA profile. Are they stealing it? Or are we expected to believe that law enforcement agencies (i.e. the government) would share or perhaps sell profiles? This, of course, is rubbish, but what trumps any civil libertarian’s contention is the fact that DNA exponentially revolutionizes society’s ability to solve crimes, to ensnare the guilty, and exonerate the innocent and this far outweighs the potential detriments decried by the conspiracy theory kooks.
Unfortunately, the media does a poor job at extolling the virtues of DNA evidence. There has been thousands of decades-old cold case crimes solved since the advent DNA profiling. Every time this occurs, it should be trumpeted on newscasts and boldly printed on the front pages of our dailies – all caps, no punctuation, sans serif.
Envision if you will the day when a swab of saliva is taken at birth. Twenty-five years later, if that DNA turns up at a crime scene on a wad of chewed gum, a comb, or a discarded coffee cup, someone’s “got some ‘splainin’ to do.” I imagine that under these circumstances, all crime investigations would then have a place to start, rather than the all too often heard, “no leads” scenario.
The war on crime was declared decades ago. It’s a shame that many jurisdictions continue to fight it with one hand tied behind their backs.
