THROUGH FOREIGN EYES
I don't see the purpose of this battle in the USA over DNA testing. Isn't it just another way to hide other purposes--for example, to create a new huge database, like fingerprints, but with much more specific data, very intimate ones, related to our private life! Of course, files are created to prevent crime, to solve cases, but what will be the future use of all the information in our DNA log? If the test is made on an innocent person, will it be destroye--or the data kept, just in case?
Actually, many anti death penalty activists are asking DNA tests to be ordered in the last weeks or even the last days of a death row prisoner's life, but a DNA test isn't always a test of innocence! When its use becomes widespread, it will function as a "beyond any doubt" standard of guilt for judges and juries. This is nothing more than a high-level, more specific fingerprint test. But as fingerprint, it can't be considered as the 100% solution, the solution to every crime, the magical answer for unsolved cases because the criminal will need to have had contact, to have fought with his victim; and there are so many gunshot crimes in the USA!
So what is the use of it when people are shot down at a distance--when there is nothing to be tested, no blood, no hair, no sperm. When the fingerprint test was operating, criminals learned to wear gloves, to wipe objects. They will probably learn fast how to prevent this type of DNA test; they have already learned to drop someone else's "track." In France there has been a lot of publicity around the DNA test that will be done on a saliva sample that may remain on the stamp affixed on an envelope in which there was a letter announcing the death of a child. If it works, which is not sure, due to time, it will be some help to close this never solved file. This is a progress, but will DNA resist to 10 years, has the sender of the letter licked the envelope? Soon no one will leave some saliva--sponge time is coming.
DNA testing is becoming one of the best ways to clear innocent people from being executed when innocent. Okay, this is also the best way to prove they are guilty, when they are. It can be in some cases a proof of innocence--okay, good; it can also be the best ally to confirm that the death sentence was correctly given. That's exactly what is going to happen in Texas, where the governor recently stopped the execution a few hours before the scheduled date to let Ricky McGinn's lawyer have a DNA test. The other question could be why not earlier to prevent this guy from enduring a mock execution protocol? In this case, the result of the test seems to confirm that he was involved in the crime, so what happens? He will be executed without a problem, doubt, remorse, or hesitation.
The DNA testing doesn't look to me like a project to prove innocence, as it looks like to many fighters against the death penalty and American lawyers. It will be a guilt project, and it will make it more difficult for defendants' lawyers to argue against evidence. Obviously , it is a progress in the fight against crime; it will probably help solve many cases, help to arrest murderers before they kill or rape again, but will it give people the doubtless certitude? The DNA testing will probably help some innocent people to be freed, and this is a striking effect, but it will also most likely, with time, increase US society's confidence that the human being strapped to the death gurney really did commit the crime. It will also indubitably make it much more difficult for convicted prisoners to have their cases reopened. Suspicions that innocents are being executed will not grow stronger as DNA testing spreads; they will grow weaker, and opponents of capital punishment will lose the offensive they have claimed in recent months. That's another proof that if we want to stop the death penalty, we have to make it clear "beyond any doubt" that the death penalty is a question for society that has nothing to do with innocence.
Execution is absurd, is a spit on human nature. No one can take someone's life. Even with a "technological guarantee." And, as every human action, how can we be sure the result is correct 100%? If it was wrong even 0.01% what is this 0.01 %--in fact, a human being--to think? And as humans are involved in different parts of the testing, how can we be sure that the DNA testing is 100% done well? The only guarantee of not making a mistake is to end the death penalty.