Glenn Ivey: DNA database: Crime fighters’ most powerful tool

Reed went on with his life until a DNA sample from Virginia linked him to the vicious crime. Without this DNA database, this brutal criminal would be walking our streets still. Instead, he pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2005. Reed is now serving 32 years for rape and attempted murder.

Interestingly, many well-intentioned individuals view DNA as a ‘‘secretive way to ‘round up the usual suspects’.” But DNA also clears the usual suspects — unless, of course, that person actually committed the crime — and implicates the guy who always ‘‘kept to himself.” That is the way justice is supposed to work.

Whenever someone is arrested, his or her fingerprints are routinely collected as part of the booking process. For more than half a century, fingerprints have been a reliable way to link criminals to their crimes. Since 1967 (the heyday of the liberal Warren Court), the U.S. Supreme Court has permitted the collection without a warrant of fingerprints, writing and voice samples, photographs, clothes and other non-testimonial evidence from suspects. DNA should be treated similarly.

DNA not only convicts the guilty, but also exonerates the innocent.

Also, the suggestion that DNA collection is somehow racially biased ignores a key fact: DNA may be the most powerful tool ever in clearing the wrongly accused. The Innocence Project has used DNA in the vast majority of its cases to free innocent men from death row. The Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office also has used DNA to clear defendants that police and prosecutors believed had committed horrible crimes.

Moreover, many victims of crime are African American. Although 27.9 percent of Maryland’s population is African American, in 2007 nearly 80 percent of all homicide victims were black. So far this year in Prince George’s County, African Americans account for 90 percent of the homicide victims. Don’t African Americans deserve to have our attackers brought to justice? Shouldn’t we use DNA to get these killers off our streets before they kill again? Don’t we also have a civil right to be safe from violent offenders?

Of course, we have to safeguard this information to make sure that it is used for law enforcement purposes only. But it is wrong to suggest that we must have a trade-off between the current, limited DNA database (and the database for fingerprints and other personal information) that Maryland already has.

The state has done an effective job of protecting that information; there is no reason to believe that collecting more samples will change that.

Glenn F. Ivey is Prince George’s County’s State’s Attorney.