Whats the Law on Expansive DNA Searches?
Last February, I got an e-mail from Callaghan, whom I’d never met, asking me to speak about the constitutionality of genetic privacy and familial searching at an FBI symposium on the topic. And so, in March, I showed up at the Sheraton Crystal City in Arlington, Va., where the FBI had assembled the legal advisers and administrators of all 50 state DNA databases. The most enthusiastic boosters of familial searches spoke first. Mitch Morrissey explained that a pilot familial searching program in his city, using specially designed software, had identified three cases in which there was a 90 percent chance of a brother or a father-son link to the sample left at the crime scene and someone in the local database. Follow-up YSTR testing suggested a match in chromosome types, although, for different reasons, none of the leads actually led to convictions. Morrissey said he was trying to convince Colorado authorities to begin familial searching and criticized the FBI for resisting. “I liken it t
