Using a relative's DNA to catch criminals
"We're looking at Great Britain and thinking, 'Why are we so behind?'" says Camille Hill, an Orange County, Calif., prosecutor.
Family searching raises difficult new questions. If done on a large scale, it would effectively expand the database to include relatives--a "significant step" toward tracking all Americans, says David Lazer of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, author of a book on DNA and criminal justice. And, since minorities are already in databanks in disproportionate numbers, more family searching might lead to "something approaching a universal database" for blacks, while including far fewer whites, argues Lazer.
Critics also warn that innocent people will become suspects just because they're related to a known criminal.
"This is the classic notion of guilt by association," says William McLain, who is helping Mercer represent the family of Charles Raines, a Silver Spring, Md., man who was convicted of armed robbery in 1982. Though Raines died last year, his relatives worry that his DNA, entered into the Maryland database in 1999, may cast suspicion on them.
"I don't want my family targeted like that," says his mother, Pearl Wilson, who is asking the state to expunge Raines's DNA.
Wilson's case raises new legal issues that courts are only beginning to sort out, though several legal experts were skeptical that she would ultimately prevail. "I don't think there's a constitutional issue here," says David Kaye, an Arizona State University law professor who has written extensively on DNA searching. "But there is a policy question that society and law enforcement ought to think about. And they didn't think about it when they created the databases."
Before they become widespread, familial searches also face a litany of practical problems. They could generate false leads, considering that even unrelated people can share some of the same genetic makeup. Lab backlogs are already common, and DNA matches have, in some cases, gone uninvestigated by police for months.
But, says Morrissey, "We're talking about important leads in our most serious cases." For strapped investigators, that may ultimately be too good to pass up.
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