Innocent until proven guilty, or innocent until your DNA partially matches? The Mail on Sunday has revealed that officers regularly trawl the National Database for possible profile matches when they hit a dead-end in their investigations:
Figures obtained by The Mail on Sunday show that detectives are ordering weekly searches of the DNA database for people with no immediate connection to any crime.The searches are used when crime scene DNA samples produce no direct match on the system.
Investigators then trawl millions of other records looking for a partial match, which might indicate that the suspect is related to an innocent person on the system.
When we are told that removing innocent DNA profiles is too time consuming, one has to wonder how much time is being wasted in the vain hope of turning up matches in familial DNA?
More to the point, what happens – as the godfather of DNA profiling Sir Alec Jeffreys said – if “there is some glitch in the
database that made a false match to my DNA profile and that brings me
into the frame of a criminal investigation which has very serious
repercussions.”
Which is probably why Lee Wyatt from Dereham (right), who was arrested and charged with assault but cleared of any wrongdoing in his local court, has taken to walking around the town with a sandwich board to try and get his DNA back from Norfolk Constabulary.
We wish Lee the best of luck but we're not holding our breath…
By Dylan Sharpe