Closing Cold Cases Using Prisoners’ DNA
There’s a lot of controversy about the use of DNA. It has its fans, and its haters. But law enforcement officials all over the world are now finding that they can close cold cases by checking DNA with that of the criminals they already have in custody.
Here’s a case in point. In New South Wales, law officials have managed to close 300 unsolved cases in the past year, just by comparing with the DNA of prisoners.
Police Minister David Campbell says, “Those people in jail for existing offences have been linked to [other] crimes that they’ve also committed as a result of these DNA tests,”
I’m sure that the ability to solve those cases has brought some closure to the loved ones of the victims involved. It seems like the only losers are the losers who committed the crimes. Very fitting.
And here in the US, a division of the Department of Justice is beginning to do the same thing:
National Institute of Justice (NIJ) seeks applications from States and units of local government for funding to identify, review, and investigate “violent crime cold cases” that have the potential to be solved using DNA analysis and to locate and analyze biological evidence associated with these cases. Experience has shown that cold case programs can solve a substantial number of violent crime cold cases, including homicides and sexual assaults.
Technology surrounding the use of DNA has come a long way and now old and degraded samples of DNA that would be unusable in the past are able to be used for comparison. Now, I think this brings up the interesting, yet controversial question about whether there should be a nationwide database of everyone’s DNA. Let’s see what you think:
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POSTED IN: Out-Of-Crime
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