DNA - A little bit Innocent

The way laws are written is often confusing, sending you to pages of information just to complete one sentence with entries such as "subject to section 5 sub-section 4a of regulations 3 the meaning of [term] shall be taken as ....." and so on.

It is written like this so that lawyers, barristers and the like can make a lot of money from clients who simply don't have time to read 20 books to understand if it is ok to do some small act.

Recently an E.U. court has told the UK that it is unlawful to keep the DNA of people who are not convicted of a crime. But rather than do as they are told and remove the DNA the government has come up with an intriguing solution:-

Get arrested for a minor offence and found innocent and your DNA will be destroyed after 6 years. Get arrested for a serious offence and found innocent then your DNA will be held for 12 years before it is destroyed.

Hold on. If you are innocent you are innocent there are no degrees of it. Should we now expect court verdicts along the lines of, "your honour we find the defendant a little bit innocent of murder and a lot innocent of manslaughter and completely innocent of any thefts".

Those in favour of the new scheme say that people who are arrested for an offence, and found innocent, are more likely to commit another one. Hold on they didn't commit the first offence, remember that's what innocent means.

The usual drongos were on the radio saying "if you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear". Yet despite what some would have us think DNA from crime scenes is not totally reliable. Perfect DNA is seldom found so a DNA trace could result in a 1 -1000 hit rate. This means if everyone in the UK was on the database there could be 60000 suspects for a single DNA sample left at any particular scene. So you stand a 1 in a 1000 chance of being wrongfully arrested.

Now tell me there is nothing to worry about.