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The case for DNA testing
Evening Standard comment22 Feb 2008
The conviction of Steve Wright, sentenced to life in prison today for the murder of five prostitutes, and the conviction of Mark Dixie for the murder of Sally Anne Bowman, represent new successes for the application of DNA testing and tracing techniques. The Wright case has prompted Reading Labour MP Martin Salter, a member of the Commons home affairs select committee, to call for all British residents to be placed on a DNA database. The intrusive nature of such a database would be too great a widening of state power for most people to stomach. But there is a case for some extension of the national DNA database.
Putting the entire population on the database would be acceptable neither in terms of privacy nor costs. But already four million people, including many arrested but not charged, are listed on it. Police now routinely take samples from all those arrested. Civil liberties campaigners say that samples should be destroyed unless the individual concerned is actually convicted of a serious offence. But that would have meant both Wright's and Dixie's DNA profiles, matched on the database to samples from minor convictions, would have been lost, hampering the police investigations. These samples are too valuable a resource to be simply thrown away.
As these cases confirm, those responsible for serious crimes rarely have a completely clean record. Anyone who commits a criminal offence should accept DNA testing as part of the cost of lawbreaking. There is a tiny risk that DNA can be mismatched to the wrong individual, especially if the sample size at a crime scene is very small - but those probabilities are for the courts to assess.
We now owe it to existing and future victims of crime to look hard at the potential of DNA technology to get more criminals off the streets. The police should be allowed to keep existing samples from the petty criminals who may progress to more serious crimes in time.
