Genetic Profiling Could Make DNA Violent Crime’s Worst Enemy

“Three strikes, you’re out” felony sentencing and Brady bill gun control may win the political popularity contests, but they’re not the breakthroughs that will deter violent crime.

There is an innovation, however, that could have an enormous impact in identifying, capturing, convicting and deterring violent criminals. After a scandal arising from improper lab practices, this technology is now quietly but relentlessly moving through America’s justice system. Where it’s used, it works. Within a decade, every community that cares about fighting crime will revise its laws and build new databases accordingly.

Genetic profiling--the use of biotechnology to identify the unique characteristics of an individual’s DNA--is about to become as prevalent as the Breathalyzer and more important than the fingerprint.

Genetic profiling used to be called genetic fingerprinting, but for reasons of technical precision and political correctness, the forensic criminologists opted for the kinder, gentler description of the technique.

With but a single hair, a dandruff flake, a skin sliver beneath the fingernails, a gobbet of spit or any other bodily fluid, crime lab investigators today can positively identify--or completely clear--a suspect based on the idiosyncrasies of that individual’s DNA.

With polymerase chain-reaction technology, a Nobel Prize-winning technique that amplifies minute strands of DNA, “criminal investigators will soon be able to identify individuals off the butt of a cigarette they smoked,” predicts Victor McKusick, the Johns Hopkins medical geneticist who chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel on forensic DNA matching.

McKusick’s panel last year concluded that although gene profiling needs rigorous monitoring, it is a valid and reliable technology that should become a part of the criminal justice system.

The challenges today are no longer technical; instead they lie in taking the technology and building a meaningful legal infrastructure around it. That means that every violent felon in America (including juveniles) must be required to submit to DNA sampling--a drop of blood or a saliva swab--just as they are now required to submit to fingerprinting and mug shots.

Every state in the nation must be required to participate in the support of local and national DNA databases to quickly identify violent criminals. It should be a national crime policy goal that a police department anywhere in the country should be able to run a DNA match tomorrow as quickly, casually and cost-effectively as it can run a license plate check today.

“The DNA technology is going to allow us to develop evidence for the courts, both the prosecution and the defense, far better than we have ever been able to do before,” says Paul Ferrara, director of Virginia’s Division of Forensic Science, which built one of the country’s first gene-profiling facilities. “In fact, we’re exonerating suspects in 25% to 30% of cases. . . . Even today, our police are much more aware of preservation of the crime scene. . . . The success rate we have going from the laboratory with evidence is going to increase dramatically.”

Currently, fewer than half the states have laws requiring DNA sampling from violent felons. Many of the states restrict sampling primarily to sexual assaults. What’s more, states have only just begun to set up their own DNA databases to record criminal profiles. “Only about half a dozen states now have functioning databanks,” Ferrara acknowledges. California and many other states have not moved nearly as quickly as they should have or could have to build their DNA databases.

What’s more, DNA database sharing between states is inadequate, although the FBI has taken a strong lead in facilitating standard-setting and cooperation with state labs for this emerging forensic technology.

“All of the state databanks are being constructed using the same technology so that data can be exchanged between them,” says John W. Hicks, director of the FBI’s crime laboratory. “We’re doing about 2,500 profiles a year right now. . . . In a few years, it should be in the tens of thousands.”

The technology has already begun to pay off. Within the last six months, several states recorded their first “cold hits” off the databases. That is, by finding a DNA sample at the scene of the assault, investigators were able to match it with a DNA sequence already stored in the database. In cases involving sexual predators or child molesters, such DNA databases are indispensable. Hicks estimates there could be more than 20,000 profiles of sex offenders in digital DNA databases by this time next year.

But when one considers how difficult it is for a criminal not to leave some organic trace of himself or herself at the scene of a violent crime--or even an ordinary robbery--it should be immediately clear that this technology radically increases the opportunities for criminal identification and capture. “In five years,” says Ferrara, “databank hits should be commonplace.”

The economics of these techniques are also favorable. Computer matching is cheap and, as biotechnology improves, the costs of DNA sampling could fall from roughly $200 a test today to less than $50 by the end of the decade.

In the interest of justice and fairness, every effort must be taken to assure that these technologies are completely valid. It’s unfortunate that there has been no technical coordination, for example, between the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Initiative and the forensic DNA programs of the FBI.

“The Human Genome Project could be helpful in addressing some of the kinds of technical statistical issues that have come up in terms of populations,” acknowledges the FBI’s Hicks. “It could help do away with a lot of the polemics on how unique certain DNA sequences are.”

The rise of forensic DNA is hardly a panacea for crime-weary Americans. On the other hand, it presents the most credible opportunity for stripping security and anonymity away from those who commit criminal acts. Criminal behavior may not be genetic. But criminals will be betrayed by their own DNA at the scene or on the weapon of a crime.