The use of DNA to arrest Bryan Kohberger for the murder of four college students in Idaho reminds me that it’s time to bring the death penalty back in a big way. Notwithstanding the absence of a single example, the possibility of executing the “wrong man” has been the left’s main line against the death penalty for decades. It’s the only argument that has ever lessened Americans’ support for capital punishment.
If DNA starts nabbing too many non-white criminals then I predict blue states will pass laws outlawing the use of DNA in criminal prosecutions because equity. I also noticed how the left loves DNA when it springs non-white criminals from prison but when it nabs them they always tell us that DNA is not that cut and dried and not as precise of a science as we've been led to believe. They can always be counted on to give us an ever shifting narrative to meet whatever their political objectives are.
Fantastic column! One of the strategies I've noticed the Innocence Project (evidently the Release Guilty Murderers Project doesn't have the same ring to it) loves to employ is demanding irrelevant objects from decades ago be tested for touch DNA.
A recent example is their involvement with Adnan Syed, made famous by the podcast "Serial." He was a muslim high school student who strangled his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999. Among the evidence used to convict him included; cell phone records tying him to the location of the burial site on the day of the murder, the fact that he was the last person to see her alive, the fact that he wrote "I'm going to kill" on the back of a note from Hae Min Lee, his multiple fake alibis, his accomplice Jay Wilds telling multiple witnesses on the day of the murder that Adnan killed Hae Min Lee, Jay Wilds later confessing to police that he helped Adnan bury Hae Min Lee and leading them to the location of her car, etc.
So despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, the Innocence Project demanded that prosecutors test the DNA of a pair of *shoes* in Hae Min Lee's car. Do they think she was strangled with a pair of shoes? It was a win-win for them - if his DNA was found on her shoes they could say "of course his DNA is on her shoes, he's her ex-boyfriend," and if it was not found on her shoes they could pretend that that constitutes proof of his innocence. Ultimately, his DNA was not found on her shoes 20 years later, and Baltimore's insane activist DA, Marilyn Mosby, who was indicted last year for mortgage fraud and perjury (which she blames on racism), dropped all charges against Adnan Syed after a judge vacated his sentence this September.
DNA technology will only improve, juries will not. In fact, science often confuses and bores juries, which are intent on finding police misconduct. DNA is like police cam videos. Prosecutors require multiple angles to establish an often myopic nature of a single view, otherwise, juries sometime won’t believe their lying eyes. One would think raw evidence is hard to ignore, like a letter I found in curb trash from an incarcerated murder defendant instructing his brother-in-law (who I was chasing to interview during trial prep and serve a subpoena on) where to find the AK-47 and how to dispose of it. “Not guilty.” The defense attorney pumped 8 complaints into my IA jacket awaiting trial. Naturally, how could you believe Beelzebub? I wouldn’t.
Not only is DNA "...put(ting) an end to 'serial killers,' who will now get caught after their first kill." but it is also creating a second deterrence to murder by enhancing the prospect of a certain and timely execution.
A good friend of mine (ex-DOJ prosecutor) who also taught law school classes told me a little logic used in every class discussing capital punishment for the many would-be barristers who doubted the efficacy of "deterrence" by posing a simple question, "If you were certain that, without exception, if you committed murder, as a force of the Universe, you would just immediately evaporate...would that be a deterrence?".
i.e., DNA has the deterrent potential of delivering swift and certain justice...unless, serendipitously, the liberals who oppose capital punishment shift gears and base their opposition on religious grounds as so many who have found God on death-row have done.
It’s why I’m a conservative. To be honest the OJ verdict was the great divide starting point to where we are today. Fox News took off. Talk radio too more than it ever was. And as for race it was for most blacks a jubilant victory. I remember the TV movie where in real terms the Goldmans are in their car in the parking structure totally dejected. Yes that day was the widening of the race divide. And all the noble work of MLK was trampled on.
Clearly the left didn't care about privacy when it came to Covid vaccine mandates, so perhaps the left don't care about anything really, perhaps they only scream the opposite of what Republicans are for. If Republicans are for DNA testing, then the left will scream about it. I'm all for responsible science, and if it is going to convict someone of the death penalty it better be pretty damn responsible, chain of custody of sample must be rock solid, the lab that did the test must be rock solid, perhaps multiple independent labs need to confirm the results, etc, etc. Then with all those checks and balances great. Also 99.99% is not very good when you consider that means there are potentially 33,000 other Americans that could be mistaken for you. Can we do better than that?
I like the part about how phone tracking / geolocators were also thrown into the mix of catching the students' killer because phone tracking and cell tower technology is the cat's meow (just not my cat's meow, she speaks full english sentences), BUT..... phone tracking / geolocation technology is unreliable when it comes to tracking people who pick up bags of ballots at distribution offices and then proceed to stuff said ballots into ballot drop boxes.
It was funny to watch the one lady walk up to the drop box and heave in a bunch of ballots , take off her latex (LatinX?) glove while turning on her heel and reaching for the garbage bin to throw the glove away. Mind you, as she approached the drop box she walked past the garbage can -- which was invisible to her as she walked TO the drop box -- meaning that she had been to that location before, she KNEW there was a garbage can and exactly where it was to the point she could turn on her heel and reach for it without looking to see if there actually was a garbage can there.
More to the immediate point of Ann's column.... it is remarkable how the Patriot Act seems to have laid the groundwork for FB and Twitter and other social media sites, not to mention the ancestry dot com sort of sites.... It is almost as though someone within the government sphere realized that even though it was illegal to gather information on American citizens, there might yet be a way to get individuals to just hand over their personal information by way of posting opinions, posting photos, sending in a sample of their DNA just for shits and giggles, to find out from which part of Sweden of Peshawar they are from.
Average people viewed the advent of the internet as a fun way to communicate with friends and to make new friends, to share interests and photos of their cats (not that I would ever send anyone a photo of Kitty.....).
Liberals / Democrats turned it into the hellhole it became, confirming Ann's statement .... "Coming up with new ways to make life worse without enriching it. "
But what about the Man who was exonerated when footage shot for CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM showed the accused was at a sporting event? Or a similar event regarding MYTHBUSTERS? It seems the innocent indeed CAN be convicted.
Leftists have always HATED anything that is absolute in its authenticity and cannot be twisted to benefit their worldview by their usual tactics of screaming "RACISM" or bullying others. They loathe the entire concept of a perfect, unarguable conclusion.
Caterwauling over "they convicted him because it's a racist jury!" is instantly nullified by "no, there's solid DNA evidence. There's no question that he's guilty." This leaves them with nothing...they can't bully you into feeling doubt anymore. DNA takes away a MASSIVE part of their argument, and the world will be a far better place as a result.
Thank you Ann for this follow up information on crime and the science lesson in “moving the goal post”. Yep. Point/Paragraph 32 “in order to put some people in the ballpark and take others out.”
Oh! And thanks to their open border policy we should now have enough fentanyl that there should be no more hand wringing about whether lethal injections can do the job.
If DNA starts nabbing too many non-white criminals then I predict blue states will pass laws outlawing the use of DNA in criminal prosecutions because equity. I also noticed how the left loves DNA when it springs non-white criminals from prison but when it nabs them they always tell us that DNA is not that cut and dried and not as precise of a science as we've been led to believe. They can always be counted on to give us an ever shifting narrative to meet whatever their political objectives are.
Fantastic column! One of the strategies I've noticed the Innocence Project (evidently the Release Guilty Murderers Project doesn't have the same ring to it) loves to employ is demanding irrelevant objects from decades ago be tested for touch DNA.
A recent example is their involvement with Adnan Syed, made famous by the podcast "Serial." He was a muslim high school student who strangled his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999. Among the evidence used to convict him included; cell phone records tying him to the location of the burial site on the day of the murder, the fact that he was the last person to see her alive, the fact that he wrote "I'm going to kill" on the back of a note from Hae Min Lee, his multiple fake alibis, his accomplice Jay Wilds telling multiple witnesses on the day of the murder that Adnan killed Hae Min Lee, Jay Wilds later confessing to police that he helped Adnan bury Hae Min Lee and leading them to the location of her car, etc.
So despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, the Innocence Project demanded that prosecutors test the DNA of a pair of *shoes* in Hae Min Lee's car. Do they think she was strangled with a pair of shoes? It was a win-win for them - if his DNA was found on her shoes they could say "of course his DNA is on her shoes, he's her ex-boyfriend," and if it was not found on her shoes they could pretend that that constitutes proof of his innocence. Ultimately, his DNA was not found on her shoes 20 years later, and Baltimore's insane activist DA, Marilyn Mosby, who was indicted last year for mortgage fraud and perjury (which she blames on racism), dropped all charges against Adnan Syed after a judge vacated his sentence this September.
DNA technology will only improve, juries will not. In fact, science often confuses and bores juries, which are intent on finding police misconduct. DNA is like police cam videos. Prosecutors require multiple angles to establish an often myopic nature of a single view, otherwise, juries sometime won’t believe their lying eyes. One would think raw evidence is hard to ignore, like a letter I found in curb trash from an incarcerated murder defendant instructing his brother-in-law (who I was chasing to interview during trial prep and serve a subpoena on) where to find the AK-47 and how to dispose of it. “Not guilty.” The defense attorney pumped 8 complaints into my IA jacket awaiting trial. Naturally, how could you believe Beelzebub? I wouldn’t.
Not only is DNA "...put(ting) an end to 'serial killers,' who will now get caught after their first kill." but it is also creating a second deterrence to murder by enhancing the prospect of a certain and timely execution.
A good friend of mine (ex-DOJ prosecutor) who also taught law school classes told me a little logic used in every class discussing capital punishment for the many would-be barristers who doubted the efficacy of "deterrence" by posing a simple question, "If you were certain that, without exception, if you committed murder, as a force of the Universe, you would just immediately evaporate...would that be a deterrence?".
i.e., DNA has the deterrent potential of delivering swift and certain justice...unless, serendipitously, the liberals who oppose capital punishment shift gears and base their opposition on religious grounds as so many who have found God on death-row have done.
It’s why I’m a conservative. To be honest the OJ verdict was the great divide starting point to where we are today. Fox News took off. Talk radio too more than it ever was. And as for race it was for most blacks a jubilant victory. I remember the TV movie where in real terms the Goldmans are in their car in the parking structure totally dejected. Yes that day was the widening of the race divide. And all the noble work of MLK was trampled on.
Clearly the left didn't care about privacy when it came to Covid vaccine mandates, so perhaps the left don't care about anything really, perhaps they only scream the opposite of what Republicans are for. If Republicans are for DNA testing, then the left will scream about it. I'm all for responsible science, and if it is going to convict someone of the death penalty it better be pretty damn responsible, chain of custody of sample must be rock solid, the lab that did the test must be rock solid, perhaps multiple independent labs need to confirm the results, etc, etc. Then with all those checks and balances great. Also 99.99% is not very good when you consider that means there are potentially 33,000 other Americans that could be mistaken for you. Can we do better than that?
I like the part about how phone tracking / geolocators were also thrown into the mix of catching the students' killer because phone tracking and cell tower technology is the cat's meow (just not my cat's meow, she speaks full english sentences), BUT..... phone tracking / geolocation technology is unreliable when it comes to tracking people who pick up bags of ballots at distribution offices and then proceed to stuff said ballots into ballot drop boxes.
It was funny to watch the one lady walk up to the drop box and heave in a bunch of ballots , take off her latex (LatinX?) glove while turning on her heel and reaching for the garbage bin to throw the glove away. Mind you, as she approached the drop box she walked past the garbage can -- which was invisible to her as she walked TO the drop box -- meaning that she had been to that location before, she KNEW there was a garbage can and exactly where it was to the point she could turn on her heel and reach for it without looking to see if there actually was a garbage can there.
More to the immediate point of Ann's column.... it is remarkable how the Patriot Act seems to have laid the groundwork for FB and Twitter and other social media sites, not to mention the ancestry dot com sort of sites.... It is almost as though someone within the government sphere realized that even though it was illegal to gather information on American citizens, there might yet be a way to get individuals to just hand over their personal information by way of posting opinions, posting photos, sending in a sample of their DNA just for shits and giggles, to find out from which part of Sweden of Peshawar they are from.
Average people viewed the advent of the internet as a fun way to communicate with friends and to make new friends, to share interests and photos of their cats (not that I would ever send anyone a photo of Kitty.....).
Liberals / Democrats turned it into the hellhole it became, confirming Ann's statement .... "Coming up with new ways to make life worse without enriching it. "
Did you read about the guy who googles how to dispose of 115 pound body and then murdered his 115 pound wife?
But what about the Man who was exonerated when footage shot for CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM showed the accused was at a sporting event? Or a similar event regarding MYTHBUSTERS? It seems the innocent indeed CAN be convicted.
Another superb column Ann, thank you!
Leftists have always HATED anything that is absolute in its authenticity and cannot be twisted to benefit their worldview by their usual tactics of screaming "RACISM" or bullying others. They loathe the entire concept of a perfect, unarguable conclusion.
Caterwauling over "they convicted him because it's a racist jury!" is instantly nullified by "no, there's solid DNA evidence. There's no question that he's guilty." This leaves them with nothing...they can't bully you into feeling doubt anymore. DNA takes away a MASSIVE part of their argument, and the world will be a far better place as a result.
Blue State people doing Blue State things.
As long as they ruin their own states, I’m not concerned. Baltimore is a Mad Max movie.
Thank you Ann for this follow up information on crime and the science lesson in “moving the goal post”. Yep. Point/Paragraph 32 “in order to put some people in the ballpark and take others out.”
Agree 💯 and install an express lane!
Oh! And thanks to their open border policy we should now have enough fentanyl that there should be no more hand wringing about whether lethal injections can do the job.