Forget for one moment that a) DNA is not as good as everyone says it is, b) the retinal scan has been proven to be quite useless for people with certain blindness-causing conditions and c) our governments awful prior record at computerized information.

The only way those cards would be useful is if it became law to keep one on your person and present it to the police whenever they ask. Again, even forgetting such incidents as Charles de Mendez and that awful prison Gladiator game, this is a bad idea.

You want to know the issue with the USA keeping DNA data on minor criminals? You guys struggle to keep your rights even with such a powerful constitution explicitly stating those rights. What you are experiencing is the slippery slope to what our government wants to bring.

Usually in ore serious crimes, cops look through people’s priors ANYWAY. The first people they’ll look at are those with the same type of crimes. If that doesn’t match, they look for people with minor crimes. At least with DNA they can filter through all that more quickly to find the most likely (hopefully) correct suspects.

A match from this database should be explicitly not probably cause for an arrest, or admissible on appeal.

Rather, such a match should be only grounds for collecting a new sample from the matched person for testing.

This sample should be submitted for matching, along with at least four other samples, with each sample being sent to a different lab along with the original from the crime scene, for comparison. These are submitted by mail, with a standardized form that doesn’t let the lab have any clue if their sample is the suspect or the controls. Which lab each gets sent to is chosen randomly from an approved list.

So five labs get one suspect and one evidence sample for testing, knowing they only have no more than a one in five chance of getting the actual suspect.

And the results of all tests must be given to the defense. So any error will be evidence for exoneration, not a way for labs to help the cops they work with by telling them what they want to hear.

Another step might work as follows:

The investigating detectives and prosecutors don’t get to know which lab did the test until the case is actually at trial. The trial must have people from all the labs testify, followed by a witness who knows which went where testifying (without knowing results) which sample was the suspects.

The last, I don’t feel quite as strongly about. The main thing is to have a test specific for the case, with the lab folk believing that the odds are that they don’t have a match, and that any false positive would be specific evidence against the state’s case, not a way to help detectives they work with and know.

But the proposed NY law would require that anyone convicted of any crime be entered into the database.

Exactly. Even misdemeanors, like turnstile jumping.

There have been multiple instances in several countries where the police have requested that, say, all post-pubescent males in a small town submit DNA samples for comparison to evidence collected during the investigation of a specific case. They’ve had good participation rates in the past when there haven’t been chilling factors (concern over the collected samples not being destroyed in a timely fashion as promised, concern over general police trustworthiness) in effect. Police misconduct can fairly well dismantle what community outrage sets up; people give the samples when there’s no reason not to and community opprobrium to encourage it, but they’re less likely to comply when they can field a legitimate excuse and refuse without implicating themselves.

I don’t think there’s any place where the cops can go about willy-nilly demanding that citizens who are neither well-established suspects nor particularly beholden to the state (incarcerated persons and persons on parole being two frequent exceptions) submit DNA samples. There’s that whole being secure in one’s person deal, for one.

Haven’t they asked entire neighborhoods or towns for samples before? Or the Duke lacrosse team?

Emphasis on asked.

Tragedy struck on the night of July 7, 1993 when Zapata was brutally raped and murdered by Jesus Mezquia while walking home from a friend’s house.

According to Unsolved Mysteries, a couple watching the late show heard what sounded like screams. A streetwalker found her beaten and mutilated body posed in a Christ-like fashion around 3:30 AM. According to the medical examiner, if she had not been strangled she would have died from the internal injuries suffered during the beating.

A jury convicted Florida fisherman Jesus Mezquia of her murder on March 25, 2004, and he was sentenced to 36 years in prison…Mezquia was linked to the crime in 2003 when a DNA profile was extracted from a saliva sample left on Zapata’s body. It had been kept in cold storage until the STR technology was developed for full extraction. An original entry in 2001 failed to generate a positive result but Mezquia’s DNA entered the national databank after he was arrested in Florida for burglary in 2002.