From Jerry Monk
Roger Hicks and Sean Williams welcome the idea of a national DNA database (30 April, p 28). Are we all to be doomed to repeat the lessons of history because the likes of Hicks and Williams will not learn them? As Mark Griffith pointed out in the same issue, contrary to Hicks’s assertion that DNA profiles will reliably reveal the identity of a criminal, their use will lead to many gross miscarriages of justice once the courts start to rely on their infallibility and the criminals get wise to the possibilities afforded by used condoms in the street. Faced with DNA evidence, it is most unlikely that the police will even look for the real rapist in such a case.
It is 60 years since my father was a guard at the Belsen concentration camp. The inmates were there in part because the efficient and admirably apolitical German civil service had, with the best of intentions, carefully and conscientiously collected, correlated and filed data on everybody. That enabled the legally elected government to round up gypsies, Jews and other “Untermenschen” with ease. Think what the Gestapo could have done with a DNA database.
It couldn’t happen here? During the 20th century governments, most of them legitimate, have slaughtered at least 30 million of their own people. If there is one lesson to be learned it is that governments cannot be trusted. Even if you can trust the present government, what about the next one?
It is not concern for any namby-pamby civil liberties that leads me to oppose DNA databases and ID cards, but for my life.
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From David Pollard
Roger Hicks wishes to volunteer his DNA profile, arguing that a national database will reduce horrific crime. I disagree.
Those who are mad and deranged are unlikely to be deterred from criminal acts. Those who are just bad will adapt and learn to evade the DNA trace – by safely disposing of bodies, for example.
But there is a deeper issue. Deterrence is at best a second-rate solution to the problem of crime. Retributive justice does little more than to ensure that the cycle is continued, by the same players or others. The real task is to encourage moral behaviour in its own right, irrespective of penalties. One of the most difficult requirements is that the ethical and moral standards and accountability of state and society should be at least as good as that required of individuals.
Oxford, UK
From Michael Corey
Your article asking whether DNA profiling will fuel prejudice is both cowardly and illogical. Hardly anything could be more beneficial to a suspect who is actually innocent than such databases, which are vastly more likely to exonerate than to cause undue suspicion, and must already have saved thousands from the anxiety of a police visit.
There have been national databases of fingerprints for years, now searchable by highly sophisticated automated algorithms, yet no one considers that everyone in these databases is a suspect. Any system can be abused, and more powerful systems are subject to more dangerous abuses. That is a very good reason to have laws, oversight and public input, but a very poor reason to suggest that the technology itself is inherently prejudicial or totalitarian.
Bellevue, Washington, US
Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex, UK
