Assembly Minority Leader Heidi Gansert, R-Reno, recently introduced a feel-good bill (AB 234) which would mandate DNA testing for anyone arrested " not convicted, mind you; arrested " on suspicion of a felony. Not only does "Arrest-and-Test" have serious civil rights problems " at least until we totally eliminate this "innocent until proven guilty" thing " but it turns out that such massive DNA testing might not even work.
That's not my opinion; that's the opinion of someone who actually knows what he's talking about.
Nevadan Durk Pearson "took a triple major at MIT in physics, biology, and psychology, with a triple minor in electrical engineering, computer science, and chemistry, graduating with a B.S. in physics in 1965. His score on the Graduate Record Exam was the highest in the nation for that year."
In addition, Durk "worked on all of the manned aerospace programs from Project Gemini to the Space Shuttle and won numerous awards, including an award from the International Society for Testing and Failure Analysis for his penetrating quality control and safety analysis. He wrote much of the safety manual for the Materials and Processing Laboratory on the Shuttle."
So it would behoove us all to carefully consider his concerns on Assemblywoman Gansert's Arrest-and-Test bill:
"I want to warn you about a terrible unintended consequence of testing the DNA of everyone accused of a felony. If a woman says that I am the father of her child, a DNA test can determine with very high accuracy whether that is the case. Note that the DNA from one person, the child, is being compared to the DNA of one other person, the purported father.
"The situation is radically different when the DNA from tens of thousands of crime scenes is being compared against a database of the DNA of tens of thousands " or many millions at the national level " of felony arrestees. The difference is the statistical risk of a false positive.
"In the one-on-one paternity case, the risk of a false positive is vanishingly low. But the risk of false positives becomes nearly 100 percent when tens of thousands of samples are compared against millions of samples.
"If the risk of a laboratory mistake causing a false positive is 1 in 100,000, that risk is acceptable in a paternity case. It is NOT acceptable when there are billions of promiscuous fishing-attempt matches being made between large DNA databases. Many innocent people will be arrested and almost certainly convicted for felonies that they did not commit."
As the saying goes, it's better for 10 guilty men to go free than to imprison one innocent man.
Adding insult to the potential injury of this new government spending program, Assemblywoman Gansert introduced it without a proposed funding mechanism for what could easily cost Nevadans some $20 million a year or more " at a time when the Legislature can't afford the government it's already built. But have no fear, Bernie Anderson is here. The Reno assembly Democrat has proposed jacking up the tax on liquor to offset the cost.
Nothing like taxing Joe Sixpack for crimes even the arrested individual might not have committed.
"The path to hell is paved with good intentions." It will take a lot of political courage to oppose this emotion-ladened bill. We all want to stop and catch bad guys who do bad things. But in our haste to "do something," we must always take care not to make a bad situation worse. Arrest-and-Test is one such bill. It should be opposed.
- Chuck Muth, of Carson City, is president and CEO
of Citizen Outreach and a political blogger. Read his views Fridays on the Appeal Opinion page or visit www.muthstruths.com. You can e-mail him at chuck@chuckmuth.com.