DNA as supportive evidence has been critisised by many, often without understanding of the background. Cases that were clearly proven have been thrown out of courts when DNA has been termed "not admissible" by people expected to be learned and so with understanding. Where is the truth?
The month of July saw two highflier court cases hit the British newspapers. The F1 supremo Max Mosley pervasive Nazi-themed sadomasochist sex scandal worked against the expected and further blew in the face of public decency when he was rewarded a 60K compensation for invasion of privacy in the circus of "interest to the public but not in public"s interest' verdict. Also, footballer bullyboy Joey Barton walked free from Manchester's Strangeways prison after serving just ten weeks of his six months' sentence for severely beating up two people in a drunken brawl last Christmas. This is the same 25-year-old who had earlier beaten up a fellow football club-mate and also explained the cause of the aggro.
The flexing of muscle is arguably almost culturally acceptable. With the economy in a nosedive and credit crunch stranglehold never as stronger on all, house prices falling by the hour and employers closing shop like in competitions to divest off businesses, why should good money be left banged up inside while raking some more on the Her Majesty's abode? Free these money machines back to the environment and watch them spread their skills about thus improving the circulation of currency. And everyone emerges a winner. Or is it?
But that justice should apply to all including the young offender who spat on a bus driver and was sentenced to a month in a Youth Offender Institute. Or to the crazed dad who hammered his ex and daughters to mincemeat. Or to the knife-killers of South London and Bristol who wished to test the sharpness of their blades on random victims. After all, their DNA is part of the 1M samples of the "innocents" that should be "purged from the government and HO databases. And, they have done their time.
It is surprising how DNA fingerprinting has been bashed about by many- including knowledgeable scientists who would otherwise be leading the way of enlightenment towards the most accurate and sure means of exonerating or convicting suspects. The uninformed would be excused, but today, even in third world countries, there is good understanding of DNA structure and function as to be rendered acceptable, unlike in UK where the presumed cradle of knowledge into the American Watson and their very own Crick"s findings would be of more benefit. However, it is very true that no prophet is a darling in his homeland.
The recently paid-for government think tank that has proposed the purge of the DNA may be sailing in the sea of ignorance that can't link the swab to tiny epithelial cells to the cell nucleus to the chromosomes to the famous DNA. They might be of the Aryan creed of pure race that does not comprehend how it shares almost 60% of their chromosomes with apes of DR Congo. They might not even want to accept that they share everything in this world with others, that the water they drink is one continuous film with the sewerage in India, that the air they breath is the same noxious effluent from morgues. They might not fathom that they have four base chemical compounds - guanine, thiamine, cytosine and adenine whose sequence in the chromosome strand is their only distinguishing factor from lowly bacteria and fungi.
We share hugs, kisses, clothes, utensils, juxtapositions, ideologies, even parentage; but DNA sequence is unique for every individual. Fingerprints can be wiped from a crime scene, while their matching can be subjective; iris can be cloned and fixed, or cheated with implants; pollen grains and microbes found on a suspect can be found in another place and thus cast doubt on the spatial and temporal patterns of a suspect. However, DNA can never be altered, unless one is a virus.
The process of DNA fingerprinting is not a call of nature- it is a very costly procedure. Beyond the scrapping of oral mucosa or seminal swab or sweat draw, there is the chromosome typing and gene sequencing to follow, before profiling can be achieved. Whether it is the electrophoresis separation or the polymerase chain reaction procedures, brains and not brawn are the power behind the success of the methods and applications therein, either for establishing heredity and tracing the presently known related diseases and diagnosis of infectious diseases, or for nabbing criminals. These procedures cost taxpayers money, and to delete them just because some pressure group "does not trust the government" or they feel this is "a step towards a totalitarian state" is beyond believe.
The beauty of the DNA procedures is the ease of use. Storage of the datasets in softcopies is the norm, thus retrieval and cross matching is but an instant. No need to go about chasing armed gangsters for fingerprints- with an extra cost of paper in ink on the environment. No time spent dusting and lifting off prints and the lengthy time of eliminations. It is a straightforward sample collection at the crime scene and a dash to the lab for analysis, and a straightforward cross matching that rules out "claims of coercion by suspects" after being taken "back to the station for further questioning".
