A: not sufficiently to justify its continued usage as it is ineffective, backlogged, and inaccurate.
INEFFECTIVE: Despite all the court cases, the use of genetic surveillance is almost entirely fruitless; less than one-tenth of 1% of DNA in the database ever leads to a conviction (Sundquist).
BACKLOGGED: As of 2009, with 80,000 new entries a year, there was a 500,000 case backlog (Moore). The FBI stated that by 2012 they expected the rate of new entries per year to increase to 1.2 million and the number of backlogged cases to increase as well. No new statistics exist on the state of the bottlenecks.
INACCURATE: Ferrell discusses “the possibility of an erroneous conviction due to overreliance on DNA evidence.” False positives are prevalent and partial matches can exclude the true culprit. Utilizing only the database leads to false matches without probable cause, putting the wrong person behind bars, and ignoring alternative forms of probable cause to pursue DNA matches allows culprits to escape.
BACKLOGGED: As of 2009, with 80,000 new entries a year, there was a 500,000 case backlog (Moore). The FBI stated that by 2012 they expected the rate of new entries per year to increase to 1.2 million and the number of backlogged cases to increase as well. No new statistics exist on the state of the bottlenecks.
INACCURATE: Ferrell discusses “the possibility of an erroneous conviction due to overreliance on DNA evidence.” False positives are prevalent and partial matches can exclude the true culprit. Utilizing only the database leads to false matches without probable cause, putting the wrong person behind bars, and ignoring alternative forms of probable cause to pursue DNA matches allows culprits to escape.
