Attorney General Roy Cooper is making a push for a bill that would require law enforcement to collect DNA on anyone arrested for many felonies.
I guess we’d expect an AG to push for a policy that will help him solve a very small number of crimes even at the expense of innocent people–after all, his job isn’t to protect the innocent (unless a victim of a crime) or worry about how sensitive DNA information would be abused (or not protected) by the government.
Sad sob stories, I admit, do help victims groups make their cases for terrible public policy–this happens all of the time. Legislators, and for that matter the public, need to look at these issues with a clear head and recognize Mr. Cooper is asking to turn our criminal justice system on its head–he wants to assume that someone is guilty before being proven innocent–a person who is arrested has less privacy rights than other innocent people. He wants to treat the innocent person, when it comes to privacy, the same as he would a convicted rapist.
On Thursday, you can learn more about this issue at a special JLF/Federalist Society lunch featuring Sarah Preston from the ACLU of North Carolina.
You can read my report on collecting DNA from arrestees and this joint op-ed that Sarah Preston and I wrote for the N & O.
