Seattle police use family DNA, latest science to identify killer 52 years later | Hacker News Reader

Seattle police use family DNA, latest science to identify killer 52 years later

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146 pointscurtis172 comments

Getting your DNA sequenced is a bit like letting an app have access to your contacts: in both, your choice has consequences for hundreds of other people. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like it’s possible to undo the effects of something your friends/family might have done :/

That's a good analogy.

At what point does what we're giving up become worth it to solve all these crimes?

I don't have an answer, I'm just wondering.

Obviously solving 1 or 2 crimes isn't worth giving up so much private information. But 10,000? 100,000? Is there even a number?

Crime is a declining problem in the U.S. and many other areas. Most of the criminals left have poor impulse control and/or are involved in gangs -- not exactly CSI material. Cops on the beat will do a good job without the fancy lab.

For me it was a choice between privacy and not knowing who my distant relatives might be since my father was adopted and never searched for his biological parents.

And what did you choose?

I chose to find out.

It doesn't undo anything, but the solution is to work towards a just society.

What possible concern could you have unless you are a serial killer?

This is data that can't be taken back once the government has it. I wish people would take the concept of the government as adversary more seriously. For example, technology is used as a tool of oppression against Uighurs in Xinjiang, LGBT people in the middle east, malcontents in any number of regimes around the world.

The US is comparatively not so oppressive, but there are still plenty of unjust laws on the books and plenty of vengeful prosecutors out there. Even for those convicted of what one might rightly consider a crime, in the vast majority of those cases the punishments are designed to be more effective at "retribution" than "correction". I think it matters to be vigilant when governments are probing the boundaries of what techniques are acceptable.

>Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like it’s possible to undo the effects of something your friends/family might have done :/

To further your analogy, one could make a comparative to Cambridge Analytica - where your Facebook data could have been harvested through the seemingly innocuous behaviour of your friend(s).

I've been part of the group who got asked to give a DNA sample in the Nicky Verstappen [1] case. This was voluntarily, and I reluctantly did this (for [mostly ethical] reasons which would make this post very long), and had a good discussion about it with the 2 policemen who came to my house to take the sample. The technique used (family DNA) is the same in that case as in the topic we discuss.

Now, I knew I didn't do it, and I knew it would be highly unlikely (but not impossible) that a male member of my family did this (not emotional but practical reasons: my uncle didn't quite live near the region, my father was almost blind and could barely walk, and my cousin was like 10 or so when this happened). So I didn't quite get the point. However, because I volunteered, the police could flag my entire family off the list of suspects. This narrowed the net around the perpetrator.

Thanks to people like me, not to mention the hard work of hundreds of policemen, the case is now solved (or well, to be precise there's a suspect on trial; not yet a convict). Because there was a match with a family member of him. And as you can read at [1] the bird had flown cause it got too hot around him.

I recently got a letter from the government that my DNA got destroyed. Whether you believe that letter or not is up to you; during my interview I had the chance to decide for it to be kept or destroyed after the case was final, and I went with the latter. I'd like to hope my choice is respected by my government.

I get it though that with common law and in the USA you gotta be very careful when talking to the police but my experience in The Netherlands with the police has been positive or in some occurrences neutral at worst. Could be white male privilege though. YMMV.

As for

> If the host is the planet, what is the claim on the other guests to your body.

On Earth's "body" the other guests are alive; you're dead. They can contribute to the future of planet earth and its inhabitants while your time is done for. So it makes sense that whatever is done with your remains and inheritance goes to the inhabitants, with a (slight) prejudice towards your direct ancestors (family). The good news is, our legal systems have law to provide for such as it is.

As for the other inhabitants in your body, we're at the point where pets have a few rights whereas cattle and such have barely none. Lets not think about the rights of bacteria and parasites and such (they don't even have a CNS to begin with, and while their usefulness is up for debate, they're not exactly a dying breed).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nicky_Verstappen

> I've been part of the group who got asked to give a DNA sample in the Nicky Verstappen [1] case. This was voluntarily, and I reluctantly did this

Great story and thanks for sharing this. I want to answer why I think this is a bad idea however.

First, I would talk to a legal defense attorney before doing this. A famous video about this topic is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE.

1) The police might have told you it was for one case but it was for another, as the police can lie.

2) The DNA test itself might give a false positive on you or your family members, putting your family to a harsher scrutiny by the police that would have otherwise, and with more judicial justification. In the investigatory zeal they might find other lesser crimes they might want to prosecute just to not be empty handed. In the U.S., they might have charged a family member on a false positive with a ridiculously overblown crime. People have killed themselves over that prosecutorial technique (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)

3) The police could fiddle with the samples and plant evidence if they thought you or someone else did it. (Steven Avery case)

4) The lab might fake results if they are in tandem with the DA (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epic-drug-lab-scandal-r...)

You are gambling with your life and the life of your family members when you make that choice. And if you were so sure a family member of yours did not do it, then the police could have come to the same conclusion on their alibis and physical state of your family members.

Even if you believe non of that is "likely to happen" there is a risk you are taking in exchange for a very small benefit (feeling good about assisting in a real investigation). And I assure you that if you had asked that, in exchange for the dna sample, your family and yourself have absolute criminal immunity for any case not related to the Nicky Verstappen, no DA would have signed off on that.

Thanks for your interesting reply as well. I recommend Americans to read it thoroughly.

> A famous video about this topic is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE.

Yes, I know that video. I've seen it more than once. Its very interesting, and I've seen other videos by ACLU on the matter as well. These videos though are all about the US of A which isn't the country where I live. All your examples are also from the USA. My comment is not about the USA (which kinda makes it off-topic in this thread). I can't comment about the legal system in the USA; I'm far too clueless about it.

> 1) The police might have told you it was for one case but it was for another, as the police can lie.

True, but I'm not afraid for such. I mean, of course I did a few naughty things in my youth (like running around with a replica plastic colt .45 which had these plastic arrows. I bought it when I was like 3 or 4 in Spain crickets) but there's also statute of limitations.

I myself was part of the target group. And as much as I said it to be unlikely male family members were involved, I could not be sure. Now I am 100% sure.

If the government wants to screw me over, they easily can. They easily can break in my house and plant some evidence in it, or on my computer. Locks aren't hard to pick, for starters. They can MITM my phone as well. What they cannot do is request my data at Facebook, cause I don't have such.

I'm also a father. If my kid was raped and murdered when she was to be 12, I'd want to see the person who did this behind bars (well, if not something else, but lets not get into that, cause that's why its good that I am not the judge on my own case, and why it is good that we have a legal system). Not just for my partner or my loved ones or myself; I don't wish the pain I'd endure as a father on any parent. So I want this perpetrator to be stopped. Family DNA is very costly procedure, so the police only resort to it when all other leads have come to a dead end.

I mean, to me, if I'd die today, that'd be less worse than seeing my (only) kid die. I had my father die a few years ago, I don't think I'll ever fully recuperate over that. But my child, my offspring, is -for me- almost the most important living organism on this planet. (Except for the planet itself.)

> She was able to match a palm print recovered from the elevator control panel, and lifted during initial crime scene processing, to those taken from Wypych in 1971 when he was arrested for larceny, SPD said.

So, why didn't they attempt this kind of matching in the first place? Much easier than DNA.

> why didn't they attempt this kind of matching in the first place?

There is no palm print database.

But there was reason to suspect him, so could they not have looked at the evidence from his other crimes?

That crime was several years later.

Yes. I guess the earlier case was cold. The link was there to find, but they only found it much later.

Is it really easier, though? I don't know if there's a palm print database (like I think there is for fingerprints), and even if there were, there's no guarantee the murderer would be in it. So pursuing this would involve opening up a lot of old physical records, looking at a complex whirling pattern and trying to see if there's anywhere in it that lines up with the print found at the crime scene. Not feasible at scale. I don't know if palm prints even have an easy classification system like fingerprints do (loop, whorl, etc) to help organize a search. So this really only works if you already have a name and are trying to confirm it.

Also, it's not like palm prints follow mathematical heredity patterns. DNA worked here because they didn't need a hit on the guy, just somebody, distantly related to him. Much lower bar for success. Any they didn't even have to spend time and money building a searchable database and populating it with samples. It was handed to them on a silver platter.

The use of DNA in ways not anticipated by informed[1] consent is wrong.

1 = Not just a signature on the form. But a real understanding of what we're going to use it for.

Even with a warrant?

How well were the participants informed about how warrants would be used to access their information?

The state has decided that you don't need to be informed in advance that a warrant will let them search through your things. The whole point of a warrant is that it lets them search. "I didn't know they could look inside my bag" isn't a legal defense.

This isn't about a defense. It's about looking through the bags of tens of thousands of people with absolutely zero evidence pointing toward those bags or their owners. If there was a type of bag that made the contents subject to dragnet warrants, it would definitely be wrong to sell those bags without informed consent.

You're talking about malum prohibitum and I'm talking about malum in se.

I don't understand. Are you saying that it's wrong for the state to grant search warrants in the course of investigating murders? Because it seems to me that the alternative is that then all one needs to do to never be convicted of a crime is to just not consent to being investigated. So which is the lesser problem, invading privacy with a warrant or never being able to prosecute any crimes?

Are you replying with questions that imply I said something that I never said?

Edit: At the time of my reply, the prior post read (in its entirety): I don't understand. Are you saying that it's wrong for the state to grant search warrants in the course of investigating murders?

I won't be replying to further posts in this thread.

His first question was "even with a warrant?" Which you replied to with another question. As I see it he's asking you to clarify your initial statement. No need to get all defensive.

There are further implications.

For example, since WWII, there have been huge efforts to identify and locate war criminals. So now, where there's DNA evidence, that could continue, even though such criminals had died. And in future wars, combatants will perhaps make efforts to retain DNA evidence.

Having war be less anonymous is arguably a great thing.

There have been efforts to identify and locate "war criminals" of one side. No effort has been made to identify, locate and charge war criminals of the other side ( which has far more war criminals if we are being honest ).

I was aiming for neutrality.

But yes, you're probably right. Although I'm not sure which "other side" you mean. And still, none of that is relevant to the point about anonymity of war.

Voluntarily shared third party info isn't private (at least under the law). This may actually end up being a good thing long term for healthcare.

A decade or two (probably less) and health insurance will plug your details into some shared DNA database and automatically disqualify you because your genetics predispose you to a laundry list of conditions, not worth the risk. Or, we will cover you but not for these genetic disorders as they are considered "preexisting conditions".

Affordable Care Act does not allow for discrimination based on pre existing conditions in the US.

GINA also forbids the use of genetic information in health insurance and employment.

That part of the law is in an extremely fragile state.

I have a congenital heart defect; If the doctor didn't find it, wouldn't that more likely fall on them? Plus if you know it from birth, isn't just a higher premium (I suppose it could be too high)?

From a behavioral perspective it is odd that a guy would do this and then stop doing it.

The "serial killers never stop" is a myth. In fact it's pretty common. Life happens to even the worst people, and they are unable to carry out their previous hobbies... In this car being murder.

Source?

Once you cross the bridge for "your thing", it feels to good to stop. Be it murder, rape or sex with minors. This is actually one of the reasons why it is so important to catch a criminal. Not to punish for previous crimes but to prevent new ones.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/health/serial-killers-gol...

Is it?

How many times would we know it happened if it was a thing?

Once the rubric is crossed it would happen again and again with increasing frequency.

I find it disconcerting that someone's remains would be violated due to being a murder suspect. This is one of many reasons to have your remains cremated, I suppose. It also avoids wasting space in a graveyard and whatnot.

I'm beginning to seriously hear people discuss that it's perfectly okay to use DNA people submit in these ways and even that it would be okay for the government to collect trash and other things that would contain DNA to add people to databases. Such arguments are usually emotional and follow the ''If just one person is saved'' trope.

This is rather harrowing, don't you agree?

If you’re dead, what do you care what happens to your remains?

I see no problem with exhuming a corpse to solve a murder case as long as there’s probable cause and a warrant, which there was here.

I agree with you about not caring, but I wonder if you've really not noticed that lots of people do care about how remains are handled?

I have, but I’m still going to question it when someone bases a comment on it.

In any case, the second half of my comment should apply just as well for such folks. We allow much worse things with a warrant, even from that perspective.

I have, but I’m still going to question it when someone bases a comment on it.

And what do you hope to accomplish by doing so?

Furthering the cause of logic and reasonability? Advocating for evidence-based forensic science winning out over superstition and other lesser concerns?

Furthering the cause of logic and reasonability? Advocating for evidence-based forensic science winning out over superstition and other lesser concerns?

Calling somebody out over something incredibly subjective, on an HN comment, seems like a terribly weak effort towards that end.

Oh no, a weak effort, how terrible.

More like "pathetic".

Your comments are so much better!

It's not like it's a new development either - police and justice systems around the world have long had the possibility, and right, to ask to exhume a body to further an investigation. It has most often been the victim historically.

So I don't see why this would be viewed as any different.

> If you’re dead, what do you care what happens to your remains?

Not speaking for this case in particular, but regarding the general question, maybe it's something you don't want your loved ones to have to think about/go through?

Not positing this as your position, but we can’t base the rightness of such an action in a vacuum that only considers the interests of one party and ignore the interests of everyone else. In weighing the relative rights of individuals and society, the relative rights of the deceased’s relatives are less important than the victims relatives in knowing the truth about their loss, and societies interests in identifying murderers, whether alive or dead.

Cremation would have made little difference in this case. They would still have identified his relatives, and obtained DNA from them. It would have just prevented confirmation.

Well. I’ve told my wife to get rid of my body as cheaply as possible if I die first. I don’t care what happens to my body.

I also don’t really like the idea of traditional funerals. Even though it’s too much to ask, I would much rather for people to have a cookout or something more joyous to celebrate my life than a funeral with everyone in suits.

No organ donation?

Sure. I signed up for organ donation.

I think signing up for organ donation means you do care about what happens to your body. You care that someone gets something out of it!

I think it means you care about what happens to other people. Your body is just a means to an end.

If you were innocent, wouldn't you want your body exhumed so that people didn't assume you were guilty and the victim's family could have closure?

I guess if one was guilty and dead with other living accomplices...

If you were innocent and japanese, and the state would like to round up all japanese people in an internment camp, wouldn't you like the state to not be able to use your dna to find all your descendants and family?

Well, could they sue your estate or assets that were inherited by your family?

"When I'm dead, just throw me in the trash"

-Diogenes of Sinope

This was the wish also of Hugh Everett, proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. He wanted his body to be thrown out with the garbage. Following his death and cremation this is apparently what happened when his wife decided to honor his request.

> If you’re dead, what do you care what happens to your remains?

Consider how your family members might feel about it? It's not just about dead you.

It is only about dead me. It's my body.

Once you are dead it is no longer your body. The dead have no rights. None whatsoever.

Might be a technicality thing, but with that logic as soon as you are dead all your estate is up for grabs by anyone.

If your body is your posession like your house or your car, then you have the right to do what you want with it.

It is up for grabs. Die as the victim of a violent crime and guess how much power your estate has to prevent an autopsy. Die of a virulent communicable disease and guess how much power your estate has to prevent your body from being cremated and the pathogens within rendered as inert as possible.

Your body is your possession like your house or your car, and I am sure you can image how often a clear legal directive like a will is placed before a state body like a court and judgement passed.

This is a faith statement not based in objective fact. Materialism has this to say about the dead; other religions express their beliefs differently.

This is not a statement of faith, it is a statement of law. Once you are dead you have no rights and any possessions, claims, and liabilities pass to that legal fiction we call your estate. Perhaps there is some non-Western culture that handles things differently, but other than the estate being more of a familial construct rather than a legal one in some instances I am not aware of any deviations from this of any significance and look forward to being shown a counter-example.

Objective fact has provided a ton of evidence for materialism and very little for any alternative.

Do you seriously think that you're the only person who cares about what happens to your body after you die? Would you be perfectly okay if somebody dug up your mother's body and did $AWFUL_THING with it?

How about we stick to the topic at hand or at least in its vicinity instead of building "insert some very imaginative and awful story that is meant to appeal to emotion but has no basis in the topic being discussed" straw man?

I can’t say I would care, it’s just a body.

Yeah, I wouldn't give a shit. She would be dead.

> If you’re dead, what do you care what happens to your remains?

Because our society believes in body autonomy, to the point that it won't use your body's organs to save other human beings, without your express consent.

Your body is your property, and it takes a damn good reason for someone else to access your property, contrary to your will.

> it won't use your body's organs to save other human beings, without your express consent

No longer true here in NL:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/14/health/new-dutch-law-orga...

I blame the Predictably Irrational guy for making opt out so popular world-wide.

I personally find it abhorrent. I used to be an organ donor before they made it opt-out in argentina: after that in protest I took myself out.

Can you elaborate about this? I can't really see reasons for outside of superstition and clinging to false hopes to be against it being opt out; and even on an opt out system, I find that doctors still "request" the permissions to the family because no one wants to deal with unnecessary legal trouble.

Even following the anti authoritarian reasoning, which I'm kind of fond, I find it silly to worry about this, with all the stuff the state decides over your life.

It reverts the burden of proof. It is now on you and your family to prove otherwise.

> I find that doctors still "request" the permissions to the family because no one wants to deal with unnecessary legal trouble.

Until they don't need to. In argentina for example, the legal requirement of getting consent from family members was lifted with the introduction of the opt-out. Funny thing about the opt-out, its an online registration!

I've seen opt-out described as a "libertarian paternalism" proposal to say that you have the liberty to choose anything but that there is an opinionated default. I find such reasoning to always lead to a death by a thousand cuts: if every single policy was implemented opt-out, you would definitely be able to manipulate the population into something.

> with all the stuff the state decides over your life.

I worry about any of them. And I don't find it comforting at all to argue that because individual liberties are breached many times, whats does one more stripe do to the tiger.

There’s always an opinionated default about everything. Having the default be no organ donation is as much a decision of the state as having the default be the opposite.

I think I understand the general point, but in this particular case the default is obviously you can't mess with a dead body.

You can't go to a cemetery and dig up corpses because "they didn't opt-out of grave-robbery". I would say that the body naturally falls under the concept of private property, which is why it is heinous to desecrate bodies and their belongings when people die.

What's crazy to me is that this problem looks so easy to resolve: if you want organ donors, pay for them. A form of reverse insurance: that will get you people in.

What makes it obvious? Just because it has usually been done that way in the past?

Paying for organ donors comes with a host of problems. It’s far from easy.

Because you wouldn't take things from a corpse in any other situation, as it is considered unsacred (disrespectful to the body) and robbery (say, take the shoes & wallet of a recently diseased person).

> Paying for organ donors comes with a host of problems. It’s far from easy.

Nobel prizes have been awarded on one solution to this problem alone!

Yeah, opt-out is quite common nowadays - Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Belgium, Austria, Colombia, Chile, etc. I think in some cases the family must still be consulted.

People in persistent vegetative states or even comas are likely to become rarer in such countries, I'd suspect.

Well, it's been 25 years since the system was implemented in Portugal, and they've only increased.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing? If I were in such a state with no hope of recovery, I’d want to die ASAP.

> Because our society believes in body autonomy, to the point that it won't use your body's organs to save other human beings, without your express consent.

> Your body is your property, and it takes a damn good reason for someone else to access your property, contrary to your will.

The way I see it, we're a guest on the planet, and after we are done for, there's a few things we leave behind: our direct ancestors (family), our indirect ancestors (mankind) and our planet as a whole (Earth with its inhabitants) many of whom are important for the planet's ecosystem. We should ensure that after we are done for, these living organisms survive and lead a happy and healthy life.

Now, I'm of the opinion that our justice system is relevant for society. It allows Earth's inhabitants to lead a happy and healthy life. This is particularly true for crimes such as murder/killing which have a deep impact on society. So if this heavy crime can be solved using the help of a deceased one, I'm all for that. Even if it involves force or naysayers.

If the host is the planet, what is the claim on the other guests to your body.

There is a great danger in the state being able to use dna this way: it is against privacy, and privacy is a tool against attacks on liberty. It is also a tool for crime.

You can't live free without crime. Once the state has this information, it can only be used against you, not in your favor.

> You can't live free without crime. Once the state has this information, it can only be used against you, not in your favor.

I understand there is risk, all things have potential extremes, but the idea that data on me can only be used against me is false on it's face.

Your body is your property up until the point when you die. Once you are dead you no longer have rights and your body becomes the property of your estate, a much weaker claim than body autonomy and one that the state can trump for a variety of reasons.

Our society also believes that probable cause and a warrant qualify as “a damn good reason.”

I wish that were really true for all humans

It’s just moving the issue to the family. Cremating a body basically became a privacy/security best practice I guess.

I don't agree at all. They're not digging people up willy nilly. They had to get a warrant. It's reasonable to have our interest in catching murderers sometimes override our right to privacy. As long as there's a reasonable apparatus for determining the balance, I'm fine with it.

I'm also not particularly troubled by DNA technology as such. If I'm going to worry about totalitarian control of society, I think it's one of the least scary technologies out there. Face recognition, gait analysis, voice recognition, financial tracking, cellphone tracking, spyware, and hoovering up social media are much better suited as instruments of instruments of control.

Yeah but they are now also using services like 23andme and such, where the people are living and have not consented to such a thing.

I'm not too privacy conscious but that information definitely moved me away from that kind of dna anaylsis.

I do agree. The "if just one person is saved" argument and "why do I care about privacy if I'm doing nothing wrong" are the worst. I try very hard to keep emotion out of arguments but those two really trigger me and make it hard to stay calm.

I'm deeply concerned about the potential surveillance state that is emerging. I just read an article about a smart city attempt in Toronto that is becoming a nightmare.

There has been some pushback, but mostly by niche groups like the EFF and FSF (please join/donate if you can). I wish more people would think through the possibilities and stop trusting the corporations and governments that are driving this so much.

Have you been to Shenzhen lately? You must swipe your ID card before buying a train pass, mandatory random police checkpoints, tens of thousands of cameras+facial recognition laser scanners. All in the name of "reducing crime". It's complete bullshit. Crime stats are pumped up and these measures are slowly introduced with little to no pushback from citizens.

There is a book by Ira Levin called 'This Perfect Day', it contains some scenes that are pretty much what you describe.

> ...with little to no pushback from citizens.

Probably because they don’t want to die

>I'm beginning to seriously hear people discuss that it's perfectly okay to use DNA people submit in these ways and even that it would be okay for the government to collect trash and other things that would contain DNA to add people to databases. Such arguments are usually emotional

It's also "emotional" to not want your remains to be compared to a serial killer's DNA.

There is admittedly a property rights argument to be made. (In a way, your decendants have the "rights" to your remains, displayed in the manner you bequeathed them, traditionally a cemetery plot in western cultures.)

But it's even more emotional to have attachment to random bits of litter.

It's not bits of litter, is information you may not want to share.

What if they use it to convict your descendants for sending their kid to the wrong school district?

All headways into new ways to use technology and pry into privacy will start with the most egregious cases, murders and serial killers, and eventually wind up being used for anything. It is a tool from the state against the citizenry: I personally find the state to be powerful enough already. It can kill anyone, seize almost all their assets and hell, they don't even need to have a reason to kill you!

> It's not bits of litter, is information you may not want to share.

I'm sympathetic to that, and if someone wants to draw up legislation around the use of DNA without some kind of due process I'd be supportive of that idea.

But it would be very difficult to regulate the collection of DNA, given existing law on property rights + the fact we spew it everywhere we go in the form of spittle, skin cells, sweat, etc.

Also, the utility of DNA for the purposes in the article is only present when it's tied to a person. It would be a massive undertaking to plan out sifting through everyone's garbage 1 by 1 to build a DNA database.

There's much less of a privacy threat from someone collecting unknown garbage, and if you're not a suspect in a murder it's unlikely in the near future anyone will steal your trash specifically.

I have a problem with the recent practice of using innocuous places like ancestry.com as a tool to find murderers through their familial relationships. Definitely I think we need to see some more regulation there.

But, as a separate issue, when there is enough evidence to convince a judge to sign a warrant, I do not have an objection to exhuming a body. I have to trust the judicial system to handle this sanely.

What are the downsides of using databases like ancestry.com to solve crimes?

Forensic testing of DNA looks at 13 positions. 9 out of 13 is considered a match.

When you match against a very large database using such a small number of polymorphisms, you get many matches.

Detectives then take that list and look for people who lived sort of in the crime area. The matches who don't happen to have an alibi they can prove for a crime sometimes decades ago are then deemed "guilty".

It's complete pseudoscience.

If they did a full DNA sequence and matched that, sure. But they never do.

Also there is the problem that many DNA samples contain DNA from multiple individuals, in which the match can be assembled piecemeal. This completely destroys the statistical validity.

DNA forensics are absolute pseudoscience. Any court case relying on DNA should be discarded by the jury.

It's not "pseudoscience" but literally how everything is investigated, DNA or not. There is always a process of elimination, strong vs weak evidence, probable cause, and many more factors. Audio/video surveillance, alibis, even eyewitness reports and just about everything else can be unreliable, incorrect or faked. That's why police gather all kinds of evidence and present it to a jury.

> That's why police gather all kinds of evidence and present it to a jury.

There was no jury evaluating evidence and deciding guilt or innocence in this case. There was also no case. Only a proclamation of guilt against a man who died long ago and had no ability to defend himself, no defense attorney assigned, no arguments made before a jury whatsoever. The only "forensic" evidence made by some dodgy startup pushing this story to sell their "services".

That's not justice at all. It's not even a caricature of justice. It's complete and absolute nonsense. Holding this up as an example of a done guilty man found is an atrocity and everyone doing so should be deeply ashamed.

Did you not read that they dug him up to do a full dna analysis to compare to seen found in the victims underwear? And that there was other evidence to link him which is what led to the permission to exhume him?

The only reason that this wasn't taken further is as he was dead.

The issue remains, though, that if he were alive all this evidence would result in a trial -- at which the prosecution would have had to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt. The accused would have the opportunity to defend himself, to have legal representation, to present evidence that might call into question or contradict aspects of the prosecution's case, etc.

As it stands, it seems that due process has been bypassed.

I'm troubled by the idea that in the case of a dead defendant, it's OK to bring in a guilty verdict on the basis of an entirely one-sided "trial".

Legally, this is not a guilty verdict, precisely because of the due process issue you cite.

The due process here was getting a warrant. No rights were violated.

There was an article on HN a while back which demonstrated how presenting this kind of evidence works in practice. Police arrested a suspect on a DNA match, put on a dog and pony show for the jury about how absurdly unlikely it was for the DNA to match by chance, he was convicted and put away for a long time. What the jury didn't know - because the prosecutors managed to block the defence from telling them - is that the police had found half-a-dozen locals who were DNA matches and chosen the most unsavoury-sounding one to arrest. The tale they'd told the jury about the absurd odds of a DNA match if he wasn't the criminal was a bunch of nonsense, and the defence weren't allowed to clue them in about this. He's probably still in jail right now.

The poster you're replying to is referring to the misuse of statistics, essentially. Think about it this way: it's not amazing that someone wins the lottery. It'd be pretty amazing if a specific person won the lottery (statistically speaking).

Here's where DNA evidence shines: through other means you have a suspect or a short list of suspects and you use DNA evidence from the crime scene to eliminate suspects or concur with existing evidence.

Here's where DNA evidence is abused: if you take essentially a "hash" of DNA and look for matches to that same hash. There are enough people that you're likely to find unrelated hits (collisions, essentially) and then law enforcement puts the onus of proving their innocence on those people. This works particularly badly for the poor who are less likely to have credit card receipts and other evidence that might otherwise constitute an alibi.

Don't believe me? Consider [1] for issues in fingerprint matching. DNA databases are getting sufficiently large that adventitious matches are much more common than you might think [2]. I believe there's been at least one murder case in the US where searching the fingerprint database brought up a completely unrelated person who had the exact same fingerprint (based on the markers) but I can't find a reference to it now.

tl;dr Fingerprints and DNA are good for eliminating or indicting someone you otherwise have legal cause to suspect and shouldn't be used as a blanket scan.

[1] https://theconversation.com/fingerprinting-to-solve-crimes-n...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/sep/09/sciencenews....

It's not even really a "hash" in the sense that there's no predictable relationship of the outputs of similar inputs. The "hash" of my DNA is going to be far more similar to people in Seattle than to people in Tokyo, so it becomes far less meaningful to say my DNA matched and I was Seattle at the time.

Hashes don't need to have large changes in output for small changes in input. A hash just transforms input data into a fixed space.

For example, perceptual hash functions like Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) for text and pHash for images are designed so that small changes in input produce small to no change in output.

Also, your DNA is an order of magnitude (or more) more similar to someone in Tokyo than it is different to someone in Seattle.

These are not conventional forensic DNA tests.

Regulation is only to stop harm. Who does this hurt ? I don't think capturing criminals counts as harm. It's not trust that's needed, what's not to trust ?

There might be good arguments on your side, but this post only brings forth "it makes me feel uneasy", which isn't good enough for me.

For one thing, an unconsidered emotional reaction can often be reversed by thinking things through and hearing good arguments from all sides.

You say

> Such arguments are usually emotional [...]

But start off your comment with

> I find it disconcerting that someone's remains would be violated due to being a murder suspect.

I guess I'm struggling to see the non-emotional component of your feeling disconcerted. Would you mind clarifying?

To a large extent, I guess isn't almost everything emotional? Even our entire monetary system, as scientific as we prefer to call it, is ultimately a kind of emotional accounting system for merits deserved, and debts owed.

But what I think the author meant was what I hear colloquially when people say others are "thinking emotionally:" that they're relying on a first-order emotional reaction.

So I guess living in an extreme surveillance state is also bad because we feel like we want humanity to continue to to live with prosperity, dignity, and liberty... And that's arguably a more-compelling thought than disagreeing because in the short-term, one life could be saved.

Yes, this was my read as well, but parent commenter was implying that an emotional argument by itself isn't good enough in face of (presumably) more logical/rational arguments (in this case, against a surveillance state).

But parent's original point about having ones remains "violated" was in itself a first-order emotional reaction. So I suppose my point is that I'm not quite seeing why their emotional response is more valid than other people's emotional responses -- presumably they've left the non-emotional part of their reaction as an "exercise for the reader"?

I don't really know, and would be interested to understand correctly (more for my edification than anything else -- I'm not great at grokking people's intentions most times).

In other words, it's not a problem that it is emotionally-motivated, but that it relied solely on emotional intuition without considering second-...n-number consequences.

> This is rather harrowing, don't you agree?

Yep. Once the process becomes streamlined, these data-sharing companies will have their own Room 641A like we saw with AT&T and streamlined dragnet surveillance of telecommunications.

In what way are they being "violated"? You make it really hard to make advances in police work because literally every form of police work is a "privacy violation", even if you are dead!

I would worry about a mistake.

If the dna match comes back as a match, is anyone going to disbelieve some super cool CSI stuff?

Forensic DNA is used to find a suspect, who is then confirmed by traditional DNA testing. It's lead generation, and is not itself used in court.

If you are ok with traditional DNA testing, this should not cause you are concern. Unless you have something to hide, like say you fathered a child somewhere and ran off, your identity unknown to the mother.

I think it's more if just one person is avenged, isn't it?

At any rate considering the difficulties there are in getting a correct match from DNA adding samples collected from the trash does sound like a problem.

Less harrowing than being murdered.

When you take a life you forfeit any more rights you have, if there’s probable cause and a warrant and it can bring closure to the victims then it’s 100% acceptable.

Don't presume to speak for victims because you're painting with too broad of a brush. My sister's killer was convicted and sent to prison. Justice may have been served but for me the day after his conviction was the same as the day before: she was still dead and nothing can change that.

There are too many downsides to putting causal DNA collection into the law enforcement toolkit. Starting with the fact the frankly anything given to law enforcement is often abused and used out of context to the fact that a false positive means anything from financial ruin to possibly a plea bargain for a crime the person didn't commit due to the abusive charge stacking prosecutors use the days.

And although it may feel righteous to you to punish the guilty it should never been done at the cost of due process. We really can't afford the erosion of any more civil liberties, IMHO.

> When you take a life you forfeit any more rights you have

Any rights? I firmly believe you still have the right to not be tortured. Can you think of any others?

> When you take a life you forfeit any more rights you have

Does that include the state?

If we held the state and it’s servants to the same standards as the state sometimes holds private individuals society would collapse. Assange wrote about this in some documents about wilileaks. If the way things actually worked were public people would be calling for heads on spikes.

There’s no reason to believe it’s possible to run a state morally and the state enables more human flourishing than the state of nature. The universal hypocrisy is moral.

> When you take a life you forfeit any more rights you have

When you're convicted of it. Not before.

> bring closure

This seems to be a very recent thing. First off, I don't think the justice system is meant to "bring closure" to the victims, whatever that means. And secondly, if someone close to me was murdered, I seriously doubt that "closure" would make me feel any better about it.

> This seems to be a very recent thing. First off, I don't think the justice system is meant to "bring closure" to the victims, whatever that means. And secondly, if someone close to me was murdered, I seriously doubt that "closure" would make me feel any better about it.

As someone who had a parent murdered ~15 years ago and still doesn't know for certain what happened, I can tell you that personally the fact that I haven't had closure regarding the incident has severely affected my life for the worse.

I am sorry for what happened to you. But can you know in advance what having further information would do to your feelings? And there'll always be gaps in that information, even in the case the article was about.

For example, when my father died, I was presented with the option of having an autopsy done to find out just what had killed him. I declined, because it wouldn't change anything. He was just as gone, I'd miss him just as much, and I'd still think about him every day.

I think so: it's actually not so much regarding the victim, but the fact that a life was taken via murder (which wouldn't have happened otherwise), and it's possible the guilty party has gotten away with it (and I might even know them) plays on my mind.

It's basically the uncertainty in terms of the who, what (although this answer is fairly evident) and why. Who for me is the big one.

I suspect if I knew for certain who was responsible, I could at least put it behind me. I accepted the "they're gone" part years ago, but not knowing who did it (for certain) at least in my case is extremely annoying (and is the same with other relatives incidentally).

I don't believe either of you is presenting a convincing argument that the other is wrong.

It seems quite plausible to me that some portion of people will be affected by not-knowing what happened, and some portion of people less so.

>This seems to be a very recent thing. First off, I don't think the justice system is meant to "bring closure" to the victims,

A stable society needs a mechanism to achieve justice other than vigilantism. So yes, "closure" (and, as mentioned elsewhere, "revenge") are aspects to punishment.

There are several aspects to punishment that must be considered to have an effective justice system:

1. Deterrent - the punishment combined with the chance of getting caught should ideally cause most people to reject committing the act in the first place.

2. The punishment should protect other people from the person who has shown willingness to cause harm.

3. The punishment should be severe enough as well as proportionate to provide a sense of justice/fairness/revenge to the victims and remove the impetus for vigilantism.

4. Many people also want the punishment to rehabilitate the convicted so that they no longer pose a threat to others.

It's also veering very close to vengeance.

And if that's what the people want, then, what the hell, let's bring back hangings in the town square, so they can get the satisfaction of seeing the murderer swing after trial, and cut out the 20-50 years of keeping them in prison.

And if they ever get it wrong, do we get to hang the jury, judge and prosecutor for murder too?

You get a hanging! And you get a hanging! And YOU get a hanging!

> When you're convicted of it. Not before.

A warrant does change your rights a bit.

I agree with what you say but more interesting to me is that the way DNA is used in forensics is pseudoscientific nonsense, along with bite and footprint matching.

As a separate issue, this guy is dead and has no ability to defend himself in court such as by providing an alibi. In the Golden State Killer case, the first "match" they found in their cold hit/blind match search (using an extremely small number of 9 to 13 SNPs) found a guy that had a solid alibi. They shrugged, kept looking, and found some other guy who didn't have an alibi. Which proves nothing given the state of cold hit against massive databank methodology combined with a bare minimum of competence at genetics and statistics. Such is the unprofessional state of so-called DNA forensic "science".

Frank Wypych, as an undisputable legal fact, is innocent until proven guilty. Since there's no been trial or jury verdict LEGALLY HE IS INNOCENT. That is the legal fact. Anyone claiming otherwise, such as the experts in this article, is lying and should forever more not be trusted to speak their own weight much less decide who is guilty of a capital crime.

You seem to think that these cases are being solved using old school CODIS database matching but that's just false. This case and the Golden State Killer case were solved using modern distant relative matching methods that are widely used in the genetic genealogy community and are far more powerful than traditional forensic DNA matching and typically use 500,000 or more markers.

It's not lying to call someone guilty based on sufficiently high non-court standards. Sometimes things skip courts, sometimes the prosecutor doesn't do their job, sometimes courts or juries get it wrong.

> They shrugged, kept looking, and found some other guy who didn't have an alibi.

And based on that, they got a search warrant.

Don't imply that their claim is based on the preliminary test.

Buried in there:

“Do you realize, for example, that when you upload your DNA, you’re potentially becoming a genetic informant on the rest of your family?” Elizabeth Joh, a UC Davis law professor who studies the Fourth Amendment and technology, told the magazine.

I can inform on a serial killer in my family even if I didn't know they were a serial killer?

Shut up and take my DNA.

Bold of you to assume this will only ever be used to hunt serial killers.

It could also be used to hunt for deadbeat fathers, or rapists who didn't murder anyone, or...

Why exactly am I supposed to be opposed to this? Your feelings and inchoate fears?

Quelle surprise.. another military/police type.. just like EAR/ONS... Seems like we could save some time and just check dna against known mil/police dna first.

I agree. If you’re going to be a police officer we should use all means necessary to ensure you’re not a rapist/murderer. Seems like a low bar to me.

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