Massachusetts Town Tries DNA Dragnet to Solve 2002 Murder
In January 2002, fashion writer Christa Worthington, 46, was found stabbed to death in her Truro, Massachusetts home. So far police have had little luck solving the murder and so earlier this month announced they would use a DNA dragnet — they want each of the almost 900 adult men in the town to donate DNA samples that can be checked against DNA from semen found in Worthington’s body. Men have the right to refuse to provide samples, but police have said that men who do refuse to provide a sample will receive close scrutiny.
Do such DNA dragnets make sense? Should men ever volunteer their DNA (and reports are that there are some men who have already volunteered their DNA?)
The American Civil Liberties Union has obvious civil liberties concerns from a test in which refusal to voluntarily cooperate is apparently going to lead to increased scrutiny as a possible suspect. In addition, those men who are innocent of the crime might want to think twice about giving a sample because evidence collected from such dragnets has a habit of being preserved and could potentially be used for other purposes.
But a more basic issue is that such DNA dragnets tend to be expensive and they rarely, if ever, result in the discovery of a suspect. As forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden told Greta Van Susteren on her Fox News show,
VAN SUSTEREN: Dr. Baden, it’s been three years, it seems like an awful lot of clues. Why can’t they solve this?
BADEN: Well, Greta, about a third of all murders in this country aren’t solved. They seem to have very good DNA evidence. I think doing this kind of dragnet has certain civil liberties aspects to it but from a scientific point of view it’s been done a number of times in England and in France and other European countries and it’s proven very inefficient, costly and ineffective in accomplishing the goal of finding out whodunit.
The European cases have, to be sure, occasionally turned up suspects, but in those cases the DNA dragnets are mandatory — those asked to give DNA samples do not have the right to refuse. The BBC notes, for example, that German police tested 16,000 samples in a murder several years ago that did manage to turn up the killer.
Such broad mandatory testing in the United States, however, would almost certainly be unconstitutional, being a clear violation of individuals’ Fifth Amendment rights.
Source:
Mass DNA test for US murder town. The BBC, January 10, 2005.
DNA Dragnet. On The Record With Greta Van Susteren, Transcript, January 11, 2005.
The Massachusetts Town Tries DNA Dragnet to Solve 2002 Murder by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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