Home Office to keep innocent DNA samples
Hey, it's only for 12 years
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The Home Office has rejected European Court of Human Rights demands that innocent people should not have their DNA stored on the national database.
Instead samples from people arrested for, but not convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes, will be removed after 12 years. The DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted for minor offences will be kept for six years.
The law will be changed to retrospectively add all prisoners serving time for serious violent or sexual offences to the database. Police will also get the right to take samples from people convicted of serious crimes while abroad.
The changes have been made in response to a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The judges said they were struck by "the blanket and indiscriminate nature of the power of retention in England and Wales". In Scotland different rules are followed - only those convicted of serious offences get put on the database. The Home Office agreed in December to remove profiles taken from children under the age of ten.
The police will additionally be asked to trawl through innocent DNA profiles, 850,000 of them, to try and link them to existing records on the Police National Computer, The Guardian reports.
Jacqui Smith said: "These new proposals will ensure that the right people are on it, as well as considering where people should come off. We will ensure that the most serious offenders are added to the database no matter when or where they were convicted."
The case was brought by two men from Sheffield who wanted their profiles removed.
Actual DNA samples will now be destroyed as soon as they are converted into profiles. Children arrested but not convicted for minor offences will have their profiles destroyed when they turn 18.
All those convicted of an offence recorded on the Police National Computer, from prostitution to taking a pedal cycle without consent, will have their DNA profile and fingerprints stored forever.
The big question is if Jacqui's tweaks to the database will be enough to satisfy the European courts. ®
COMMENTS
Missing the Obvious
A) What if someone hacks the database and changes the DNA
b) Do any on you really understand DNA? Take DNA samples from family members and get back to me on a "definite"criminal
Look here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/gcuvxrmqpn94cpcp/
SIGH
The Crown Prosecution Service
Is so called because it *prosecutes*. It has *no* interest in finding evidence that will acquit you. Finding evidence is the job of the Police. Finding evidence to clear your is the job of the lawyer for the defence.
However it astonishes me that either the Police or CPS don't perform even *basic* sanity checks on the people and evidence they are relying to get a conviction. It seems the assume the witnesses (that agree with them) are *always* telling the truth and the ones who don't are lying (Barry George comes to mind as a sample of eyewitness testimony).
And I'm sure Reg readers know what happens when you assume things.
Still if your normal looking, reasonably articulate and have a half way competent lawyer you should be acquitted. No harm done, right? Yes I am being sarcastic.
Of course if you're quite large and sinister looking with learning difficulties you'll need a damm good lawyer to get you off first time round.
Mine is the one with the freshly vacuumed out pockets, which hasn't been hung up in a ballistics testing lab for 18 months and a copy of Joe Orton's Loot in it. Richard Attenborough shows how an old school policeman gets a result.
You'll be clutching yourself with mirth.
@ Ascylto
Your not alone in what it does your behaviour.
I do the same, along with covert recording/video if I am near my accuser (ex wife !), live real time vehicle and mobile tracking etc etc the list goes on.
Its a great way to lead your life and is only needed thanks to the incompetence of the Police and CPS.
If you are arrested for something you are guilty, they just need to find a way to prove it. That includes getting other plod to write corroborating statements that would need time travel to be accurate.
Find your own evidence your innocent and its deemed "inadmissable", ask the plod/CPS to look at it and your told "its not relevant to your case" which actually means its not relevant to them prosecuting you.
Get the evidence anyway and let them know you have it and the fur really flies and they get really hacked off. I still laugh at one letter the CPS sent when they thought we had obtained what they didnt want us to have, they really were not happy to have there case undermined by the truth.
Paris, at least she is honest
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