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

I chose to find out.

> 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.)

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.

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!