DNA tracking of killer opens a Pandora’s box
In the course of the pursuit of justice, human history includes countless examples of achieving desired results with ultimately questionable methods.
We can all applaud the fact that using the atomic bomb, twice, against the Japanese almost certainly hastened the end of World War II in the Pacific. But that doesn’t mean every single person with a brain and a heart doesn’t, after reflection, understand that the deadly devastation wreaked creates very real ethical problems that resound to this day.
So that’s the place the United States judicial system, and certainly California’s, finds itself in the wake of the arrest at long last of the man believed to be the Golden State Killer through a most creative and unusual — and potentially scary for everyone’s privacy — genetic profile using a sample of the suspect’s DNA.
More than three decades after his last known killing, one of the most prolific serial killers and rapists was caught by using online genealogical sites to find that DNA match, prosecutors said last month.
The wild new investigative tool was used when law enforcement labs compared the DNA collected from a long-ago crime scene to online genetic profiles ordinary people use for genealogical research and found a match: a relative of the man police have identified as Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, who was arrested at his suburban Sacramento home.
You’ve seen the pictures of the hunched, haunted, elderly seeming suspect on our front pages. And he probably appears to be so bewildered precisely because, after so long without capture for his alleged crimes, he’s finally been brought down by Big Science crossed with newfangled crowd-sourcing.
We join all, especially the victims and their families, in rejoicing at the ingenuity of the policing here, assuming the suddenly longer arm of the law has its right man.
And we also join with freedom-loving Americans who now have yet another reason to worry about government intrusions into good citizens’ privacy in the otherwise commendable pursuit of truly bad guys.
That means we can cheer the arrest of DeAngelo at the same time as we can call for using this moment in the legal system’s history to look deeply into the moral ramifications of what just happened.
People use genealogical sites such as 23andMe by sending in a cheek swab and thereby finding long-lost relatives and interesting tidbits about their ancient ancestors from Finland to Senegal, as well as what their own personal genetic cocktail might be.
They do not, presumably, use them in order to aid law enforcement’s search for their creepy Uncle Albert and whatever crimes he may have committed.
For there’s the crux of the matter, now that this Pandora’s box has been opened. It’s good that a killer and rapist is apparently in custody. So, does that mean it would also be right to use this method to track down, say, a cat burglar? A car thief? An income-tax cheat? A dealer in illegal drugs?
Right now is the time to have that societal discussion, the same as with other matters involving historical norms of privacy in America. As any watcher of international television crime dramas knows, there’s a police camera on every block in European cities. Not here. Not yet. Let’s at least ask questions about our growing surveillance state before the intrusive tide fully turns.