California is often the nation’s trend setter: fashion, green technology, locavore movement, and, these days, budget woes. True to form, another “left coast” idea has moved east. New York has joined the handful of jurisdictions that permit familial DNA searching to identify suspects.
Quietly and quickly approved in December 2009, a state rule provides that DNA found at a crime scene that fails to exactly match the DNA of a person already contained New York’s DNA database can nonetheless be used to search for suspects if the DNA closely resembles that of someone on file.
The premise of this strategy is uncomplicated. Family members share genetic traits, and it would be reasonable to conclude that a partial DNA match indicates that a relative of a person in the database is the unknown suspect. Thus, the search can be narrowed to family members of the person who clearly didn’t commit the crime in question (since that person’s DNA does not precisely match the crime scene sample).
I’ve written about the inherent pitfalls of this approach. While no one wants to rally against legitimate crime fighting tools, there are also issues with literally bringing the investigation into the family room. By any other name, an investigation of this source is based on guilt-by-relation, and since families can be expansive, the investigation would affect more innocent people than guilty.
California has the most aggressive approach to using familial DNA searches as an investigation technique, and other jurisdictions have followed suit. Notably, there is no national standard for how close a DNA profile has to be to qualify as possibly related to the database offender.
Law enforcement officials say the policy frees forensic scientists from sitting on potentially valuable evidence that they had not been able to turn over to local police departments.
As I said in my article, we’re well past debating whether these policies should be implemented at all, however, there needs to be informed discussions about repercussions, regulations, and limitations in connection with these policies.
